Practical Obstacles to Deploying Active Learning

Machine learning techniques have long been the foundations of speech processing. Bayesian classiflcation, decision trees, unsupervised clustering, the EM algorithm, maximum entropy, etc. are all part of existing speech recognition systems. The success of statistical speech recognition has led to the rise of statistical and empirical methods in natural language processing. Indeed, many of the machine learning techniques used in language processing, from statistical part-of-speech tagging to the noisy channel model for machine translation have roots in work conducted in the speech fleld. However, advances in learning theory and algorithmic machine learning approaches in recent years have led to signiflcant changes in the direction and emphasis of the statistical and learning centered research in natural language processing and made a mark on natural language and speech processing. Approaches such as memory based learning, a range of linear classiflers such as Boosting, SVMs and SNoW and others have been successfully applied to a broad range of natural language problems, and these now inspire new research in speech retrieval and recognition. We have seen an increasingly close collaboration between voice and language processing researchers in some of the shared tasks such as spontaneous speech recognition and understanding, voice data information extraction, and machine translation. The purpose of this special issue was to invite speech and language researchers to communicate with each other, and with the machine learning community on the latest machine learning advances in their work. The call for papers was met with great enthusiasm from the speech and natural language community. Thirty six submissions were received; each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers. Only ten papers were selected re∞ecting not only some of the best work on machine learning in the areas of natural language and spoken language processing but also what we view as a collection of papers that represent current trends in these areas of research both from the perspective of

The growing availability of big data spontaneously generated by social media platforms allows us to leverage natural language processing (NLP) methods as valuable tools to understand the opioid crisis. We aimed to understand how NLP has been applied to Reddit (Reddit Inc) data to study opioid use. We systematically searched for peer-reviewed studies and conference abstracts in PubMed, Scopus, PsycINFO, ACL Anthology, IEEE Xplore, and Association for Computing Machinery data repositories up to July 19, 2022. Inclusion criteria were studies investigating opioid use, using NLP techniques to analyze the textual corpora, and using Reddit as the social media data source. We were specifically interested in mapping studies' overarching goals and findings, methodologies and software used, and main limitations. In total, 30 studies were included, which were classified into 4 nonmutually exclusive overarching goal categories: methodological (n=6, 20% studies), infodemiology (n=22, 73% studies), infoveillance (n=7, 23% studies), and pharmacovigilance (n=3, 10% studies). NLP methods were used to identify content relevant to opioid use among vast quantities of textual data, to establish potential relationships between opioid use patterns or profiles and contextual factors or comorbidities, and to anticipate individuals' transitions between different opioid-related subreddits, likely revealing progression through opioid use stages. Most studies used an embedding technique (12/30, 40%), prediction or classification approach (12/30, 40%), topic modeling (9/30, 30%), and sentiment analysis (6/30, 20%). The most frequently used programming languages were Python (20/30, 67%) and R (2/30, 7%). Among the studies that reported limitations (20/30, 67%), the most cited was the uncertainty regarding whether redditors participating in these forums were representative of people who use opioids (8/20, 40%). The papers were very recent (28/30, 93%), from 2019 to 2022, with authors from a range of disciplines. This scoping review identified a wide variety of NLP techniques and applications used to support surveillance and social media interventions addressing the opioid crisis. Despite the clear potential of these methods to enable the identification of opioid-relevant content in Reddit and its analysis, there are limits to the degree of interpretive meaning that they can provide. Moreover, we identified the need for standardized ethical guidelines to govern the use of Reddit data to safeguard the anonymity and privacy of people using these forums.

Psychedelics and meditation are known for their potential to induce personally meaningful and even transformative experiences. However, it is unclear how similar these experiences are, or how they differ from each other. This explorative study used natural language processing (NLP) methods to compare reports of personally meaningful subjective experiences facilitated by either psychedelic substances or meditation. Participants (N = 197) wrote open-ended narrative reports about their most meaningful experience facilitated either with psychedelics (n = 134) or meditation (n = 63). These reports were analysed with text similarity analyses, topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The semantic and lexical contents of the reports were highly similar and both groups expressed positive emotions on average. However, psychedelic experience reports were more emotionally charged, showing higher levels of positive and negative sentiments compared to more neutral meditation experiences. These results suggest that the two types of subjective experiences might be quite similar in general, but emotional intensity could be a distinguishing factor between them. Challenges with the NLP methods and the dataset limit the conclusions that can be drawn from the study. However, it offers new hypotheses and suggestions for future research on transformative experiences.

The authors tested whether natural language processing (NLP) methods can detect and classify cognitive distortions in text messages between clinicians and people with serious mental illness as effectively as clinically trained human raters. Text messages (N=7,354) were collected from 39 clients in a randomized controlled trial of a 12-week texting intervention. Clinical annotators labeled messages for common cognitive distortions: mental filtering, jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing, "should" statements, and overgeneralizing. Multiple NLP classification methods were applied to the same messages, and performance was compared. A tuned model that used bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (F1=0.62) achieved performance comparable to that of clinical raters in classifying texts with any distortion (F1=0.63) and superior to that of other models. NLP methods can be used to effectively detect and classify cognitive distortions in text exchanges, and they have the potential to inform scalable automated tools for clinical support during message-based care for people with serious mental illness.

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Hugh Perkins, Yi Yang. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Kazuma Kadowaki, Ryu Iida, Kentaro Torisawa, Jong-Hoon Oh, Julien Kloetzer. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Xiujun Li, Chunyuan Li, Qiaolin Xia, Yonatan Bisk, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jianfeng Gao, Noah A. Smith, Yejin Choi. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Xinchi Chen, Chunchuan Lyu, Ivan Titov. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Min Zeng, Yisen Wang, Yuan Luo. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Xudong Han, Philip Schulz, Trevor Cohn. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Yichao Zhou, Jyun-Yu Jiang, Kai-Wei Chang, Wei Wang. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Yufan Jiang, Chi Hu, Tong Xiao, Chunliang Zhang, Jingbo Zhu. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Preksha Nema, Akash Kumar Mohankumar, Mitesh M. Khapra, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan, Balaraman Ravindran. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Sandro Pezzelle, Raquel Fernández. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.