PhD dissertation @ MIT CCC

paper, repo, @medialab

Sharing personal narratives is a fundamental aspect of human social behavior as it helps share our life experiences. A substantial effort has been made towards developing storytelling machines or inferring characters' features. However, we don't usually find models that compare narratives. This task is remarkably challenging for machines since they, as sometimes we do, lack an understanding of what similarity means. We first introduce a corpus of real-world spoken personal narratives comprising 10,296 narrative clauses from 594 video transcripts. Second, we ask non-narrative experts to annotate those clauses under Labov's sociolinguistic model of personal narratives (i.e., action, orientation, and evaluation clause types) and train a classifier that reaches 84.7% F-score for the highest-agreed clauses. Finally, we match stories and explore whether people implicitly rely on Labov's framework to compare narratives. We show that actions followed by the narrator's evaluation of these are the aspects non-experts consider the most.

@Belen Saldias and Deb Roy

Intelligence Never Seeks Perfection, Instead Requires Effort

INSPIRE is a program in partnership with a local middle school that seeks to expose students to stories of triumph and hope that they find personally meaningful. A key part of the program is a mobile application that delivers short video stories of professionals talking about their life journeys. Stories are sourced from our content partner Roadtrip Nation, and delivered through a virtual coach ("Jo Jo").  Jo Jo personalizes video recommendations for students and prompts them to reflect after they watch videos. The program also includes in-person community building and engagement initiatives developed in collaboration with the school to supplement and extend what the mobile application can offer on its own.

@Nabeel Gillani, Belen Saldias, Sneha Makini, Maggie Hughes, Deb Roy.

paper, poster, news, @medialab

Affective Network: Giving emotional awareness to Twitter users. 

Emotional contagion in online social networks has been of great interest over the past years. Previous studies have mainly focused on finding evidence of affection contagion in homophilic atmospheres. However, these studies have overlooked users' awareness of the sentiments they share and consume online. In this work, I present an experiment with Twitter users that aims to help them better understand which emotions they experience on this social network. I introduce Affective Network (Aff-Net), available at https://AffectiveNetwork.media.mit.edu , a Google Chrome extension that enables Twitter users to filter and make explicit (through colored visual marks) the emotional content in their News Feed.

@Belen Saldias and Roz Picard

paper, repo

Language generation focuses on producing fluent sentences, commonly by learning to predict the next word in a sequence. Conditional generation allows a model to constrain this generation on additional attributes such as style or another source language. However, most conditional models are still trained by minimizing cross-entropy loss, without explicitly building the conditions into the loss. In this work, we develop a REINFORCE-like algorithm to penalize failures to match the desired constraints and to help reduce the mismatch between the loss and evaluation metrics. We implement and train a baseline model according to the current state-of-the-art for comparison. Our models greatly improve the accuracy with which generation satisfies the desired constraints, with no decrease in performance in terms of fluency (perplexity). 

paper, repo, slides

When humans count the number of objects in a scene, we may not remember the color specific objects, because we tend to focus our attention on the task we aim to solve. However, we usually have a panoramic view that allows us to understand the context of the scene. Similarly, Visual Question Answering (VQA) machines can be trained to focus on different general and specific image descriptors to become more efficient or accurate. In this work, I present a model that concatenates bottom-up and top-down attention features for VQA. Applying a relevance analysis to abstract and real-world images shows that bottom-up features strongly influence responses to general and ambiguous questions, while top-down attention focuses mainly on object-detection tasks classes.

@Belen Saldias

 paper, poster, @medialab

In recent years, there has been an unprecedented growth in content that is shared and presented on social media platforms. Along with this growth, however, there is an increasing concern over the lack of control social media users have on the content they are shown by invisible algorithms. Gobo aims to help users control what’s hidden from their feeds, add perspectives from outside their network to help them break filter bubbles, and explore why they see certain content on their feed. Through an iterative design process, we've built and deployed Gobo in the wild and conducted a pilot study in the form of a survey to understand how the users respond to the shift of control from invisible algorithms to themselves.

@Rahul Bhargava, Anna Chung, Neil S Gaikwad, Alexis Hope, Dennis Jen, Jasmin Rubinovitz, Belen Saldias, Ethan Zuckerman

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