Zeeshan Ali Sayyed


2021

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Bidirectional Domain Adaptation Using Weighted Multi-Task Learning
Daniel Dakota | Zeeshan Ali Sayyed | Sandra Kübler
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Parsing Technologies and the IWPT 2021 Shared Task on Parsing into Enhanced Universal Dependencies (IWPT 2021)

Domain adaption in syntactic parsing is still a significant challenge. We address the issue of data imbalance between the in-domain and out-of-domain treebank typically used for the problem. We define domain adaptation as a Multi-task learning (MTL) problem, which allows us to train two parsers, one for each do-main. Our results show that the MTL approach is beneficial for the smaller treebank. For the larger treebank, we need to use loss weighting in order to avoid a decrease in performance be-low the single task. In order to determine towhat degree the data imbalance between two domains and the domain differences affect results, we also carry out an experiment with two imbalanced in-domain treebanks and show that loss weighting also improves performance in an in-domain setting. Given loss weighting in MTL, we can improve results for both parsers.

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Annotations Matter: Leveraging Multi-task Learning to Parse UD and SUD
Zeeshan Ali Sayyed | Daniel Dakota
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2018

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Detecting Linguistic Traces of Depression in Topic-Restricted Text: Attending to Self-Stigmatized Depression with NLP
JT Wolohan | Misato Hiraga | Atreyee Mukherjee | Zeeshan Ali Sayyed | Matthew Millard
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Language Cognition and Computational Models

Natural language processing researchers have proven the ability of machine learning approaches to detect depression-related cues from language; however, to date, these efforts have primarily assumed it was acceptable to leave depression-related texts in the data. Our concerns with this are twofold: first, that the models may be overfitting on depression-related signals, which may not be present in all depressed users (only those who talk about depression on social media); and second, that these models would under-perform for users who are sensitive to the public stigma of depression. This study demonstrates the validity to those concerns. We construct a novel corpus of texts from 12,106 Reddit users and perform lexical and predictive analyses under two conditions: one where all text produced by the users is included and one where the depression data is withheld. We find significant differences in the language used by depressed users under the two conditions as well as a difference in the ability of machine learning algorithms to correctly detect depression. However, despite the lexical differences and reduced classification performance–each of which suggests that users may be able to fool algorithms by avoiding direct discussion of depression–a still respectable overall performance suggests lexical models are reasonably robust and well suited for a role in a diagnostic or monitoring capacity.