Inferring #MeToo Experience Tweets using Classic and Neural Models

The #MeToo movement is one of several calls for social change to gain traction on Twitter in the past decade. The movement went viral after prominent individuals shared their experiences, and much of its power continues to be derived from experience sharing. Because millions of #MeToo tweets are published every year, it is important to accurately identify experience-related tweets. Therefore, we propose a new learning task and compare the effectiveness of classic machine learning models, ensemble models, and a neural network model that incorporates a pre-trained language model to reduce the impact of feature sparsity. We find that even with limited training data, the neural network model outperforms the classic and ensemble classifiers. Finally, we analyze the experience-related conversation in English during the first year of the #MeToo movement and determine that experience tweets represent a sizable minority of the conversation and are moderately correlated to major events.