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Fine-grained analysis of language varieties and demographics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2020

Francisco Rangel Open the ORCID record for Francisco Rangel [Opens in a new window] ,
Paolo Rosso ,
Wajdi Zaghouani  and
Anis Charfi
Francisco Rangel*
Affiliation:
Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technologies, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Paolo Rosso
Affiliation:
Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technologies, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Wajdi Zaghouani
Affiliation:
College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Ar-Rayyan, Qatar
Anis Charfi
Affiliation:
Information Systems Program, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Ar-Rayyan, Qatar
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: kico.rangel@gmail.com
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Abstract

The rise of social media empowers people to interact and communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. The possibility of being anonymous avoids censorship and enables freedom of expression. Nevertheless, this anonymity might lead to cybersecurity issues, such as opinion spam, sexual harassment, incitement to hatred or even terrorism propaganda. In such cases, there is a need to know more about the anonymous users and this could be useful in several domains beyond security and forensics such as marketing, for example. In this paper, we focus on a fine-grained analysis of language varieties while considering also the authors’ demographics. We present a Low-Dimensionality Statistical Embedding method to represent text documents. We compared the performance of this method with the best performing teams in the Author Profiling task at PAN 2017. We obtained an average accuracy of 92.08% versus 91.84% for the best performing team at PAN 2017. We also analyse the relationship of the language variety identification with the authors’ gender. Furthermore, we applied our proposed method to a more fine-grained annotated corpus of Arabic varieties covering 22 Arab countries and obtained an overall accuracy of 88.89%. We have also investigated the effect of the authors’ age and gender on the identification of the different Arabic varieties, as well as the effect of the corpus size on the performance of our method.

Keywords

Language variety identificationDemographicsGenderAgeAuthor profilingCybersecurityArabic
Type
Article
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 26 , Issue 6: Natural Language Processing for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects , November 2020 , pp. 641 - 661
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

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