acl acl2011 acl2011-97 acl2011-97-reference knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining

97 acl-2011-Discovering Sociolinguistic Associations with Structured Sparsity


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Author: Jacob Eisenstein ; Noah A. Smith ; Eric P. Xing

Abstract: We present a method to discover robust and interpretable sociolinguistic associations from raw geotagged text data. Using aggregate demographic statistics about the authors’ geographic communities, we solve a multi-output regression problem between demographics and lexical frequencies. By imposing a composite ‘1,∞ regularizer, we obtain structured sparsity, driving entire rows of coefficients to zero. We perform two regression studies. First, we use term frequencies to predict demographic attributes; our method identifies a compact set of words that are strongly associated with author demographics. Next, we conjoin demographic attributes into features, which we use to predict term frequencies. The composite regularizer identifies a small number of features, which correspond to communities of authors united by shared demographic and linguistic properties.


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