In recent years, the increasing propagation of hate speech on social media and the urgent need for effective countermeasures have drawn significant investment from governments, companies, and empirical research. Despite a large number of emerging scientific studies to address the problem, a major limitation of existing work is the lack of comparative evaluations, which makes it difficult to assess the contribution of individual works. This paper introduces a new method based on a deep neural network combining convolutional and gated recurrent networks. We conduct an extensive evaluation of the method against several baselines and state of the art on the largest collection of publicly available Twitter datasets to date, and show that compared to previously reported results on these datasets, our proposed method is able to capture both word sequence and order information in short texts, and it sets new benchmark by outperforming on 6 out of 7 datasets by between 1 and 13 percents in F1. We also extend the existing dataset collection on this task by creating a new dataset covering different topics.

We expand Nakamura's (2005)

The purpose of this study is to contrast the forecasting performance of two non-linear models, a regime-switching vector autoregressive model (RS-VAR) and a recurrent neural network (RNN), to that of a linear benchmark VAR model. Our specific forecasting experiment is UK inflation and we utilize monthly data from 1969-2003. The RS-VAR and the RNN perform approximately on par over both monthly and annual forecast horizons. Both non-linear models perform significantly better than the VAR model.

The increasing presence of hate speech on social media has drawn significant investment from governments, companies, and empirical research. Existing methods typically use a supervised text classification approach that depends on carefully engineered features. However, it is unclear if these features contribute equally to the performance of such methods. We conduct a feature selection analysis in such a task using Twitter as a case study, and show findings that challenge conventional perception of the importance of manual feature engineering: automatic feature selection can drastically reduce the carefully engineered features by over 90% and selects predominantly generic features often used by many other language related tasks; nevertheless, the resulting models perform better using automatically selected features than carefully crafted task-specific features.

This paper provides the most fully comprehensive evidence to date on whether or not monetary aggregates are valuable for forecasting US inflation in the early to mid 2000s. We explore a wide range of different definitions of money, including different methods of aggregation and different collections of included monetary assets. In our forecasting experiment we use two non-linear techniques, namely, recurrent neural networks and kernel recursive least squares regression -techniques that are new to macroeconomics. Recurrent neural networks operate with potentially unbounded input memory, while the kernel regression technique is a finite memory predictor. The two methodologies compete to find the best fitting US inflation forecasting models and are then compared to forecasts from a naive random walk model. The best models were non-linear autoregressive models based on kernel methods. Our findings do not provide much support for the usefulness of monetary aggregates in forecasting inflation.

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Teaser: The extent to which connectionist systems have succeeded in parsing a wide range of realistic sentences, containing syntactic structures that are commonly found in natural language interaction, is reviewed, and an assessment is made of their ability to model human sentence processing.Keywords: connectionism, neural networks, parsing, syntactic processing, corpus. SummaryThe key developments of two decades of connectionist parsing are reviewed. Connectionist parsers are assessed according to their ability to automatically learn from examples to represent syntactic structures, without being presented with symbolic grammar rules. This review also considers the extent to which connectionist parsers offer computational models of human sentence processing and provide plausible accounts of psycholinguistic data. In considering these issues, special attention is paid to the level of realism, the nature of the modularity, and the type of processing that is to be found in a wide range of parsers.

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