Journalists publish statements provided by people, or \textit{sources} to contextualize current events, help voters make informed decisions, and hold powerful individuals accountable. In this work, we construct an ontological labeling system for sources based on each source's \textit{affiliation} and \textit{role}. We build a probabilistic model to infer these attributes for named sources and to describe news articles as mixtures of these sources. Our model outperforms existing mixture modeling and co-clustering approaches and correctly infers source-type in 80\% of expert-evaluated trials. Such work can facilitate research in downstream tasks like opinion and argumentation mining, representing a first step towards machine-in-the-loop \textit{computational journalism} systems.
Soongsil University（崇实大学）；KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；Institute of Basic Science（基础科学研究院）
Quotes are critical for establishing credibility in news articles. A direct quote enclosed in quotation marks has a strong visual appeal and is a sign of a reliable citation. Unfortunately, this journalistic practice is not strictly followed, and a quote in the headline is often "contextomized." Such a quote uses words out of context in a way that alters the speaker's intention so that there is no semantically matching quote in the body text. We present QuoteCSE, a contrastive learning framework that represents the embedding of news quotes based on domain-driven positive and negative samples t…
The use of attributed quotes is the most direct and least filtered pathway of information propagation in news. Consequently, quotes play a central role in the conception, reception, and analysis of news stories. Since quotes provide a more direct window into a speaker's mind than regular reporting, they are a valuable resource for journalists and researchers alike. While substantial research efforts have been devoted to methods for the automated extraction of quotes from news and their attribution to speakers, few comprehensive corpora of attributed quotes from contemporary sources are availab…
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
While composing a new document, anything from a news article to an email or essay, authors often utilize direct quotes from a variety of sources. Although an author may know what point they would like to make, selecting an appropriate quote for the specific context may be time-consuming and difficult. We therefore propose a novel context-aware quote recommendation system which utilizes the content an author has already written to generate a ranked list of quotable paragraphs and spans of tokens from a given source document. We approach quote recommendation as a variant of open-domain question …
This paper presents our systems for SemEval 2020 Shared Task 11: Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles. We participate in both the span identification and technique classification subtasks and report on experiments using different BERT-based models along with handcrafted features. Our models perform well above the baselines for both tasks, and we contribute ablation studies and discussion of our results to dissect the effectiveness of different features and techniques with the goal of aiding future studies in propaganda detection.
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
News article revision histories provide clues to narrative and factual evolution in news articles. To facilitate analysis of this evolution, we present the first publicly available dataset of news revision histories, NewsEdits. Our dataset is large-scale and multilingual; it contains 1.2 million articles with 4.6 million versions from over 22 English- and French-language newspaper sources based in three countries, spanning 15 years of coverage (2006-2021). We define article-level edit actions: Addition, Deletion, Edit and Refactor, and develop a high-accuracy extraction algorithm to identify t…
On the topic of journalistic integrity, the current state of accurate, impartial news reporting has garnered much debate in context to the 2016 US Presidential Election. In pursuit of computational evaluation of news text, the statements (attributions) ascribed by media outlets to sources provide a common category of evidence on which to operate. In this paper, we develop an approach to compare partisan traits of news text attributions and apply it to characterize differences in statements ascribed to candidate, Hilary Clinton, and incumbent President, Donald Trump. In doing so, we present a m…
One of the most impressive human endeavors of the past two decades is the collection and categorization of human knowledge in the free and accessible format that is Wikipedia. In this work we ask what makes a term worthy of entering this edifice of knowledge, and having a page of its own in Wikipedia? To what extent is this a natural product of on-going human discourse and discussion rather than an idiosyncratic choice of Wikipedia editors? Specifically, we aim to identify such "wiki-worthy" terms in a massive news corpus, and see if this can be done with no, or minimal, dependency on actual W…
De La Salle University（德拉萨大学）；University of the Philippines Diliman（菲律宾大学迪利曼分校）
Transformers represent the state-of-the-art in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in recent years, proving effective even in tasks done in low-resource languages. While pretrained transformers for these languages can be made, it is challenging to measure their true performance and capacity due to the lack of hard benchmark datasets, as well as the difficulty and cost of producing them. In this paper, we present three contributions: First, we propose a methodology for automatically producing Natural Language Inference (NLI) benchmark datasets for low-resource languages using published news artic…
Developing and improving computational approaches to covering news can increase journalistic output and improve the way stories are covered. In this work we approach the problem of covering crime stories in Los Angeles. We present a machine-in-the-loop system that covers individual crimes by (1) learning the prototypical coverage archetypes from classical news articles on crime to learn their structure and (2) using output from the Los Angeles Police department to generate "lede paragraphs", first structural unit of crime-articles. We introduce a probabilistic graphical model for learning arti…
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)（庞培法布拉大学）
This paper describes, develops, and validates SciLens, a method to evaluate the quality of scientific news articles. The starting point for our work are structured methodologies that define a series of quality aspects for manually evaluating news. Based on these aspects, we describe a series of indicators of news quality. According to our experiments, these indicators help non-experts evaluate more accurately the quality of a scientific news article, compared to non-experts that do not have access to these indicators. Furthermore, SciLens can also be used to produce a completely automated qual…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）
Misleading information spreads on the Internet at an incredible speed, which can lead to irreparable consequences in some cases. It is becoming essential to develop fake news detection technologies. While substantial work has been done in this direction, one of the limitations of the current approaches is that these models are focused only on one language and do not use multilingual information. In this work, we propose Multiverse -- a new feature based on multilingual evidence that can be used for fake news detection and improve existing approaches. The hypothesis of the usage of cross-lingua…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
The work herein describes a system for automatic news category and keyphrase labeling, presented in the context of our motivation to improve the speed at which a user can find relevant and interesting content within an aggregation platform. A set of 12 discrete categories were applied to over 500,000 news articles for training a neural network, to be used to facilitate the more in-depth task of extracting the most significant keyphrases. The latter was done using three methods: statistical, graphical and numerical, using the pre-identified category label to improve relevance of extracted phras…
Netaji Subhas University of Technology（尼塔吉·苏巴斯技术大学）
Fake News Detection (FND) is an essential field in natural language processing that aims to identify and check the truthfulness of major claims in a news article to decide the news veracity. FND finds its uses in preventing social, political and national damage caused due to misrepresentation of facts which may harm a certain section of society. Further, with the explosive rise in fake news dissemination over social media, including images and text, it has become imperative to identify fake news faster and more accurately. To solve this problem, this work investigates a novel multimodal stacke…
Center for Data Analytics and Biomedical Informatics（数据分析与生物信息学中心）；Temple University（天普大学）
Social scientists have shown that up to 50% if the content posted to a news article have no relation to its journalistic content. In this study we propose a classification algorithm to categorize user comments posted to a new article base don their alignment to its content. The alignment seek to match user comments to an article based on similarity off content, entities in discussion, and topic. We proposed a BERTAC, BAERT-based approach that learn jointly article-comment embeddings and infers the relevance class of comments. We introduce an ordinal classification loss that penalizes the diffe…
This paper seeks to address the classification of misinformation in news articles using a Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network. Articles were taken from 2018; a year that was filled with reporters writing about President Donald Trump, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Fifa World Cup, and Russia. The model presented successfully classifies these articles with an accuracy score of 0.779944. We consider this to be successful because the model was trained on articles that included languages other than English as well as incomplete, or fragmented, articles.
