4 accepted papers
Word embeddings improve the performance of NLP systems by revealing the hidden structural relationships between words. Despite their success in many applications, word embeddings have seen very little use in computational social science NLP tasks, presumably due to their reliance on big data, and to…
The iterative nature of the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm presents a challenge for privacy-preserving estimation, as each iteration increases the amount of noise needed. We propose a practical private EM algorithm that overcomes this challenge using two innovations: (1) a novel moment pert…
Understanding the diffusion of information in social network and social media requires modeling the text diffusion process. In this work, we develop the HawkesTopic model (HTM) for analyzing text-based cascades, such as "retweeting a post" or "publishing a follow-up blog post". HTM combines Hawkes p…
Topic models have become increasingly prominent text-analytic machine learning tools for research in the social sciences and the humanities. In particular, custom topic models can be developed to answer specific research questions. The design of these models requires a non-trivial amount of effort a…