Help! Need Advice on Identifying Advice

Venkata Subrahmanyan Govindarajan, Benjamin Chen, Rebecca Warholic, Katrin Erk, Junyi Jessy Li


Abstract
Humans use language to accomplish a wide variety of tasks - asking for and giving advice being one of them. In online advice forums, advice is mixed in with non-advice, like emotional support, and is sometimes stated explicitly, sometimes implicitly. Understanding the language of advice would equip systems with a better grasp of language pragmatics; practically, the ability to identify advice would drastically increase the efficiency of advice-seeking online, as well as advice-giving in natural language generation systems. We present a dataset in English from two Reddit advice forums - r/AskParents and r/needadvice - annotated for whether sentences in posts contain advice or not. Our analysis reveals rich linguistic phenomena in advice discourse. We present preliminary models showing that while pre-trained language models are able to capture advice better than rule-based systems, advice identification is challenging, and we identify directions for future research.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.427
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5295–5306
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.427
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.427
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Venkata Subrahmanyan Govindarajan, Benjamin Chen, Rebecca Warholic, Katrin Erk, and Junyi Jessy Li. 2020. Help! Need Advice on Identifying Advice. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 5295–5306, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Help! Need Advice on Identifying Advice (Govindarajan et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.427.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939263
Code
 venkatasg/Advice-EMNLP2020
Data
AskParentsneedadvice