Publications

2023

1. ICWSM

   Bridging Nations: Quantifying the Role of Multilinguals in Communication on Social Media

   Julia Mendelsohn,  Sayan Ghosh, David Jurgens,  and Ceren Budak

   In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 2023

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   Social media enables the rapid spread of many kinds of in- formation, from pop culture memes to social movements. However, little is known about how information crosses linguistic boundaries. We apply causal inference techniques on the European Twitter network to quantify the structural role and communication influence of multilingual users in cross-lingual information exchange. Overall, multilinguals play an essential role; posting in multiple languages increases betweenness centrality by 13%, and having a multilingual network neighbor increases monolinguals’ odds of sharing domains and hashtags from another language 16-fold and 4-fold, respectively. We further show that multilinguals have a greater impact on diffusing information is less accessible to their monolingual compatriots, such as information from far-away countries and content about regional politics, nascent social movements, and job opportunities. By highlighting information exchange across borders, this work sheds light on a crucial component of how information and ideas spread around the world.

   @inproceedings{mendelsohn2023bridging,
     title = {Bridging Nations: Quantifying the Role of Multilinguals in Communication on Social Media},
     author = {Mendelsohn, Julia and Ghosh, Sayan and Jurgens, David and Budak, Ceren},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media},
     volume = {17},
     url = {https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/22174},
     pages = {626--637},
     publisher = {International AAAI Conference on Web and Social media},
     year = {2023},
   }

2022

1. ACL

   Learning to Mediate Disparities Towards Pragmatic Communication

   Yuwei Bao,  Sayan Ghosh,  and Joyce Chai

   In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) May 2022

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   Human communication is a collaborative process. Speakers, on top of conveying their own intent, adjust the content and language expressions by taking the listeners into account, including their knowledge background, personalities, and physical capabilities. Towards building AI agents with similar abilities in language communication, we propose a novel rational reasoning framework, Pragmatic Rational Speaker (PRS), where the speaker attempts to learn the speaker-listener disparity and adjust the speech accordingly, by adding a light-weighted disparity adjustment layer into working memory on top of speaker’s long-term memory system. By fixing the long-term memory, the PRS only needs to update its working memory to learn and adapt to different types of listeners. To validate our framework, we create a dataset that simulates different types of speaker-listener disparities in the context of referential games. Our empirical results demonstrate that the PRS is able to shift its output towards the language that listeners are able to understand, significantly improve the collaborative task outcome, and learn the disparity more efficiently than joint training.

   @inproceedings{bao-etal-2022-learning,
     title = {Learning to Mediate Disparities Towards Pragmatic Communication},
     author = {Bao, Yuwei and Ghosh, Sayan and Chai, Joyce},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
     month = may,
     year = {2022},
     address = {Dublin, Ireland},
     publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
     url = {https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.202},
     doi = {10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.202},
     pages = {2829--2842},
   }

2021

1. W-NUT

   Detecting Cross-Geographic Biases in Toxicity Modeling on Social Media

   Sayan Ghosh, Dylan Baker, David Jurgens,  and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran

   In Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Noisy User-Generated Text (W-NUT 2021) Nov 2021

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   Online social media platforms increasingly rely on Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to detect abusive content at scale in order to mitigate the harms it causes to their users. However, these techniques suffer from various sampling and association biases present in training data, often resulting in sub-par performance on content relevant to marginalized groups, potentially furthering disproportionate harms towards them. Studies on such biases so far have focused on only a handful of axes of disparities and subgroups that have annotations/lexicons available. Consequently, biases concerning non-Western contexts are largely ignored in the literature. In this paper, we introduce a weakly supervised method to robustly detect lexical biases in broader geo-cultural contexts. Through a case study on a publicly available toxicity detection model, we demonstrate that our method identifies salient groups of cross-geographic errors, and, in a follow up, demonstrate that these groupings reflect human judgments of offensive and inoffensive language in those geographic contexts. We also conduct analysis of a model trained on a dataset with ground truth labels to better understand these biases, and present preliminary mitigation experiments.

   @inproceedings{ghosh-etal-2021-detecting,
     title = {Detecting Cross-Geographic Biases in Toxicity Modeling on Social Media},
     author = {Ghosh, Sayan and Baker, Dylan and Jurgens, David and Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Noisy User-Generated Text (W-NUT 2021)},
     month = nov,
     year = {2021},
     address = {Online},
     publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
     url = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.wnut-1.35},
     pages = {313--328},
   }

2019

1. ACL

   Wetin dey with these comments? Modeling Sociolinguistic Factors Affecting Code-switching Behavior in Nigerian Online Discussions

   Innocent Ndubuisi-Obi*, Sayan Ghosh*,  and David Jurgens

   In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics Jul 2019

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   Multilingual individuals code switch between languages as a part of a complex communication process. However, most computational studies have examined only one or a handful of contextual factors predictive of switching. Here, we examine Naija-English code switching in a rich contextual environment to understand the social and topical factors eliciting a switch. We introduce a new corpus of 330K articles and accompanying 389K comments labeled for code switching behavior. In modeling whether a comment will switch, we show that topic-driven variation, tribal affiliation, emotional valence, and audience design all play complementary roles in behavior.

   @inproceedings{ndubuisi-obi-etal-2019-wetin,
     title = {Wetin dey with these comments? Modeling Sociolinguistic Factors Affecting Code-switching Behavior in Nigerian Online Discussions},
     author = {Ndubuisi-Obi*, Innocent and Ghosh*, Sayan and Jurgens, David},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
     month = jul,
     year = {2019},
     address = {Florence, Italy},
     publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
     url = {https://aclanthology.org/P19-1625},
     doi = {10.18653/v1/P19-1625},
     pages = {6204--6214},
   }