United States

Social media offers the potential to provide detection of outbreaks or public health incidents faster than traditional reporting mechanisms. In this paper, we developed and tested a pipeline to produce alerts of influenza-like illness (ILI) using Twitter data. Data was collected from the Twitter API, querying keywords referring to ILI symptoms and geolocated to Wales. Tweets that described first-hand descriptions of symptoms (as opposed to non-personal descriptions) were classified using transformer-based language models specialised on social media (BERTweet and TimeLMs), which were trained on a manually labelled dataset matching the above criteria. After gathering this data, weekly tweet counts were applied to the regression-based Noufaily algorithm to identify exceedances throughout 2022. The algorithm was also applied to counts of ILI-related GP consultations for comparison. Exceedance detection applied to the classified tweet counts produced alerts starting four weeks earlier than by using GP consultation data. These results demonstrate the potential to facilitate advanced preparedness for unexpected increases in healthcare burdens.

NAACL 2025

Towards a Social Media-based Disease Surveillance System for Early Detection of Influenza-like Illnesses: A Twitter Case Study in Wales

exceedence detection

influenza

early warning detection

disease surveillance

bertweet

social media

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

workshop paper

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This study explores the differences between textual and multimodal sentiment annotations on videos and their impact on transcript-based sentiment modelling. Using the UniC and CH-SIMS datasets which are annotated at both the unimodal and multimodal level, we conducted a statistical analysis and sentiment modelling experiments. Results reveal significant differences between the two annotation types, with textual annotations yielding better performance in sentiment modelling and demonstrating superior generalization ability. These findings highlight the challenges of cross-modality generalization and provide insights for advancing sentiment analysis.

Sentiment Analysis on Video Transcripts: Comparing the Value of Textual and Multimodal Annotations

A formidable challenge regarding scraped corpora of social media is the omission of whitespaces, causing pairs of words to be conflated together as one. In order for the text to be properly parsed and analyzed, these missing spaces must be detected and restored. However, it is particularly hard to restore whitespace in languages such as Hebrew which are written without vowels, because a conflated form can often be split into multiple different pairs of valid words. Thus, a simple dictionary lookup is not feasible. In this paper, we present and evaluate a series of neural approaches to restore missing spaces in scraped Hebrew social media. Our best all-around method involved pretraining a new character-based BERT model for Hebrew, and then fine-tuning a space restoration model on top of this new BERT model. This method is blazing fast, high-performing, and open for unrestricted use, providing a practical solution to process huge Hebrew social media corpora with a consumer-grade GPU. We release the new BERT model and the fine-tuned space-restoration model to the NLP community.

Restoring Missing Spaces in Scraped Hebrew Social Media

This paper addresses the problem of identifying and analyzing ‘noisy’ spelling errors in texts written by second language (L2) learners’ texts in a written corpus. Using Python, spelling errors were identified in 5774 texts greater than or equal to 66 words (total=1,814,209 words), selected from a corpus of 4.2 million words (Authors-1). The statistical analysis used hurdle() models in R, which are appropriate for non-normal, count data, with many zeros.

Identifying and analyzing 'noisy' spelling errors in a second language corpus

This study explores the automatic normalization of noisy and highly technical anomaly reports by an LLM. Different prompts are tested to instruct the LLM to clean the text without changing the structure, vocabulary or specialized lexicon. The evaluation of this task is made in two steps. First, the Character Error Rate (CER) is calculated to assess the changes made compared to a gold standard on a small sample. Second, an automatic sequence labeling task is performed on the original and on the corrected datasets with a transformer-based classifier. If some configurations of LLM and prompts can reach satisfying CER scores, the sequence labeling task shows that the normalization has a small negative impact on performance.

Automatic normalization of noisy technical reports with an LLM: What effects on a downstream task?

We present a suite of experiments that allow us to understand the underlying challenges of language model adaptation to nonstandard text. We do so by designing interventions that approximate core features of user-generated text and their interactions with existing biases of language models. Applying our interventions during language model adaptation to nonstandard text variations, we gain important insights into when such adaptation is successful, as well as the aspects of text variation and noise that are particularly difficult for language models to handle. For instance, on text with character-level variation, out-of-the-box performance improves even with a few additional training examples but approaches a plateau, suggesting that more data is not the solution. In contrast, on text with variation involving new words or meanings, far more data is needed, but it leads to a massive breakthrough in performance. Our findings reveal that existing models lack the necessary infrastructure to handle diverse forms of nonstandard text, guiding the development of more resilient language modeling techniques. We make the code for our interventions, which can be applied to any English text data, publicly available.

We’re Calling an Intervention: Exploring Fundamental Hurdles in Adapting Language Models to Nonstandard Text

Detecting cynical comments in online communication poses a significant challenge in human-computer interaction, especially given the massive proliferation of discussions on platforms like YouTube. These comments often include offensive or disruptive patterns, such as sarcasm, negative feelings, specific reasons, and an attitude of being right. To address this problem, we present a web platform for the Spanish language that has been developed and leverages natural language processing and machine learning techniques. The platform detects comments and provides valuable information to users by focusing on analyzing comments. The core models are based on pre-trained architectures, including BETO, SpanBERTa, Multilingual BERT, RoBERTuito, and BERT, enabling robust detection of cynical comments. Our platform was trained and tested with Spanish comments from car analysis channels on YouTube. The results show that models achieve performance above 0.8 F1 for all types of cynical comments in the text classification task but achieve lower performance (around 0.6-0.7 F1) for the more arduous token classification task.

Applying Transformer Architectures to Detect Cynical Comments in Spanish Social Media

We introduce FaBERT, a Persian BERT-base model pre-trained on the HmBlogs corpus, encompassing both informal and formal Persian texts. FaBERT is designed to excel in traditional Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks, addressing the intricacies of diverse sentence structures and linguistic styles prevalent in the Persian language. In our comprehensive evaluation of FaBERT on 12 datasets in various downstream tasks, encompassing Sentiment Analysis (SA), Named Entity Recognition (NER), Natural Language Inference (NLI), Question Answering (QA), and Question Paraphrasing (QP), it consistently demonstrated improved performance, all achieved within a compact model size. The findings highlight the importance of utilizing diverse corpora, such as HmBlogs, to enhance the performance of language models like BERT in Persian Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications.

FaBERT: Pre-training BERT on Persian Blogs

Evaluating machine translation (MT) of user-generated content (UGC) involves unique challenges such as checking whether the nuance of emotions from the source are preserved in the target text. Recent studies have proposed emotion-related datasets, frameworks and models to automatically evaluate MT quality of Chinese UGC, without relying on reference translations. However, whether these models are robust to the challenge of preserving emotional nuances has been left largely unexplored. To this end, we introduce a novel method inspired by information theory which generates challenging Chinese homophone words related to emotions, by leveraging the concept of *self-information*. Our approach generates homophones that were observed to cause translation errors in emotion preservation, and exposes vulnerabilities in MT models struggling to preserve relevant emotions. We evaluate the efficacy of our method using human evaluation and compare it with an existing one, showing that our method achieves higher correlation with human judgments. The generated Chinese homophones, along with their manual translations, are utilized to generate perturbations and to probe the robustness of existing quality evaluation models, including models trained using multi-task learning, fine-tuned variants of multilingual language models, as well as large language models (LLMs). Our results indicate that LLMs with larger size exhibit higher stability and robustness to such perturbations. We release our data and code for reproducibility and further research.

Automatically Generating Chinese Homophone Words to Probe Machine Translation Estimation Systems

Multi-domain text analysis presents significant challenges, particularly in Persian name entity recognition (NER). Using a single model for multiple domains often fails to capture the specific features of different domains. That is why many scientists have focused on prompting chatbots for this issue. However, studies show that these models do not achieve remarkable results in NER tasks without proper fine-tuning while training and storing a chatbot is extremely costly. This paper presents a new approach using one core model with various sets of domain-specific parameters. By using techniques like LoRAs and pre-fix tuning, along with extra layers, we train each set of trainable parameters for a specific domain. This allows the model to perform as well as individual models for each domain. Tests on various formal and informal datasets show that by using these added parameters, the proposed model performs much better than existing practical models. The model needs only one instance for storage but achieves excellent results across all domains. This paper also examines each adaptation strategy, outlining its strengths, weaknesses, and the best settings and hyperparameters for Persian NER. Lastly, this study introduces a new document-based domain detection system for situations where text domains are unknown. This novel pipeline enhances the adaptability and practicality of the proposed approach for real-world applications.

Multi-BERT: Leveraging Adapters for Low-Resource Multi-Domain Adaptation

Named Entity Recognition (NER), a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), has shown significant advancements for high-resource languages. However, due to a lack of annotated datasets and limited representation in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), it remains understudied and challenging for low-resource languages. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a data augmentation technique that generates culturally plausible sentences and experiments on four low-resource Pakistani languages; Urdu, Shahmukhi, Sindhi, and Pashto. By fine-tuning multilingual masked Large Language Models (LLMs), our approach demonstrates significant improvements in NER performance for Shahmukhi and Pashto. We further explore the capability of generative LLMs for NER and data augmentation using few-shot learning.

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Sentiment Analysis on Video Transcripts: Comparing the Value of Textual and Multimodal Annotations

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