Abstract
Detecting disclosures of individuals' employment status on social media can provide valuable information to match job seekers with suitable vacancies, offer social protection, or measure labor market flows. However, identifying such personal disclosures is a challenging task due to their rarity in a sea of social media content and the variety of linguistic forms used to describe them. Here, we examine three Active Learning (AL) strategies in real-world settings of extreme class imbalance, and identify five types of disclosures about individuals' employment status (e.g. job loss) in three languages using BERT-based classification models. Our findings show that, even under extreme imbalance settings, a small number of AL iterations is sufficient to obtain large and significant gains in precision, recall, and diversity of results compared to a supervised baseline with the same number of labels. We also find that no AL strategy consistently outperforms the rest. Qualitative analysis suggests that AL helps focus the attention mechanism of BERT on core terms and adjust the boundaries of semantic expansion, highlighting the importance of interpretable models to provide greater control and visibility into this dynamic learning process.
Original language | American English |
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Title of host publication | ACL 2022 - 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers) |
Editors | Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio |
Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) |
Pages | 6564-6587 |
Number of pages | 24 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781955917216 |
State | Published - 1 Jan 2022 |
Event | 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2022 - Dublin, Ireland Duration: 22 May 2022 → 27 May 2022 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.0/ |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics |
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Volume | 1 |
Conference
Conference | 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2022 |
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Country/Territory | Ireland |
City | Dublin |
Period | 22/05/22 → 27/05/22 |
Internet address |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Language and Linguistics
- Computer Science Applications
- Linguistics and Language