Exploiting Transformer-based Multitask Learning for the Detection of Media Bias in News Articles
University of Wuppertal（伍珀塔尔大学）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）；University of Passau（帕绍大学）；Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia（塞尔维亚人工智能研发研究院）；University of Kassel（卡塞尔大学）；NII Tokyo（东京国立信息学研究所）
Timo Spinde, Jan-David Krieger, Terry Ruas, Jelena Mitrović, Franz Götz-Hahn, Akiko Aizawa, Bela Gipp
Media has a substantial impact on the public perception of events. A one-sided or polarizing perspective on any topic is usually described as media bias. One of the ways how bias in news articles can be introduced is by altering word choice. Biased word choices are not always obvious, nor do they exhibit high context-dependency. Hence, detecting bias is often difficult. We propose a Transformer-based deep learning architecture trained via Multi-Task Learning using six bias-related data sets to tackle the media bias detection problem. Our best-performing implementation achieves a macro $F_{1}$ of 0.776, a performance boost of 3\% compared to our baseline, outperforming existing methods. Our results indicate Multi-Task Learning as a promising alternative to improve existing baseline models in identifying slanted reporting.
De La Salle University（德拉萨尔大学）；Center for Language Technologies (CeLT)（语言技术中心）
The use of the internet as a fast medium of spreading fake news reinforces the need for computational tools that combat it. Techniques that train fake news classifiers exist, but they all assume an abundance of resources including large labeled datasets and expert-curated corpora, which low-resource languages may not have. In this work, we make two main contributions: First, we alleviate resource scarcity by constructing the first expertly-curated benchmark dataset for fake news detection in Filipino, which we call "Fake News Filipino." Second, we benchmark Transfer Learning (TL) techniques an…
University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
The CLEF 2019 ProtestNews Lab tasks participants to identify text relating to political protests within larger corpora of news data. Three tasks include article classification, sentence detection, and event extraction. I apply multitask neural networks capable of producing predictions for two and three of these tasks simultaneously. The multitask framework allows the model to learn relevant features from the training data of all three tasks. This paper demonstrates performance near or above the reported state-of-the-art for automated political event coding though noted differences in research …
University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；Universidad Nacional de Colombia（哥伦比亚国立大学）
Recognizing named entities in a document is a key task in many NLP applications. Although current state-of-the-art approaches to this task reach a high performance on clean text (e.g. newswire genres), those algorithms dramatically degrade when they are moved to noisy environments such as social media domains. We present two systems that address the challenges of processing social media data using character-level phonetics and phonology, word embeddings, and Part-of-Speech tags as features. The first model is a multitask end-to-end Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM)-Conditional Rando…
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…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Multi-Task Learning (MTL) models have shown their robustness, effectiveness, and efficiency for transferring learned knowledge across tasks. In real industrial applications such as web content classification, multiple classification tasks are predicted from the same input text such as a web article. However, at the serving time, the existing multitask transformer models such as prompt or adaptor based approaches need to conduct N forward passes for N tasks with O(N) computation cost. To tackle this problem, we propose a scalable method that can achieve stronger performance with close to O(1) c…
University of Information Technology（信息科技大学）；Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City（越南国家大学胡志明市分校）
This paper presents the system that we propose for the Reliable Intelligence Indentification on Vietnamese Social Network Sites (ReINTEL) task of the Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing 2020 (VLSP 2020) Shared Task. In this task, the VLSP 2020 provides a dataset with approximately 6,000 trainning news/posts annotated with reliable or unreliable labels, and a test set consists of 2,000 examples without labels. In this paper, we conduct experiments on different transfer learning models, which are bert4news and PhoBERT fine-tuned to predict whether the news is reliable or not. In our experi…
University of Tyumen（秋明大学）；"Organization of cognitive associative systems" LLC（“认知联想系统组织”有限责任公司）
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on various areas of human life. Hence, the coronavirus pandemic and its consequences are being actively discussed on social media. However, not all social media posts are truthful. Many of them spread fake news that cause panic among readers, misinform people and thus exacerbate the effect of the pandemic. In this paper, we present our results at the Constraint@AAAI2021 Shared Task: COVID-19 Fake News Detection in English. In particular, we propose our approach using the transformer-based ensemble of COVID-Twitter-BERT (CT-BERT) models. We describe t…
School of Computer Science and Engineering, California State University, San Bernardino（加州州立大学圣贝纳迪诺分校计算机科学与工程学院）
Sentiment-based stock prediction systems aim to explore sentiment or event signals from online corpora and attempt to relate the signals to stock price variations. Both the feature-based and neural-networks-based approaches have delivered promising results. However, the frequently minor fluctuations of the stock prices restrict learning the sentiment of text from price patterns, and learning market sentiment from text can be biased if the text is irrelevant to the underlying market. In addition, when using discrete word features, the polarity of a certain term can change over time according to…
Over the last years, there has been an unprecedented proliferation of fake news. As a consequence, we are more susceptible to the pernicious impact that misinformation and disinformation spreading can have in different segments of our society. Thus, the development of tools for automatic detection of fake news plays and important role in the prevention of its negative effects. Most attempts to detect and classify false content focus only on using textual information. Multimodal approaches are less frequent and they typically classify news either as true or fake. In this work, we perform a fine…
Exploiting User Comments for Early Detection of Fake News Prior to Users' Commenting
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Personalized news recommendation is very important for online news platforms to help users find interested news and improve user experience. News and user representation learning is critical for news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods usually learn these representations based on single news information, e.g., title, which may be insufficient. In this paper we propose a neural news recommendation approach which can learn informative representations of users and news by exploiting different kinds of news information. The core of our approach is a news encoder and a user encoder…
Huazhong Agricultural University（华中农业大学）；University at Buffalo, The State University of New York（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
Nowadays, social network platforms have been the prime source for people to experience news and events due to their capacities to spread information rapidly, which inevitably provides a fertile ground for the dissemination of fake news. Thus, it is significant to detect fake news otherwise it could cause public misleading and panic. Existing deep learning models have achieved great progress to tackle the problem of fake news detection. However, training an effective deep learning model usually requires a large amount of labeled news, while it is expensive and time-consuming to provide sufficie…
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）；Lehigh University（理海大学）
Disinformation and fake news have posed detrimental effects on individuals and society in recent years, attracting broad attention to fake news detection. The majority of existing fake news detection algorithms focus on mining news content and/or the surrounding exogenous context for discovering deceptive signals; while the endogenous preference of a user when he/she decides to spread a piece of fake news or not is ignored. The confirmation bias theory has indicated that a user is more likely to spread a piece of fake news when it confirms his/her existing beliefs/preferences. Users' historica…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）
Emotion plays an important role in detecting fake news online. When leveraging emotional signals, the existing methods focus on exploiting the emotions of news contents that conveyed by the publishers (i.e., publisher emotion). However, fake news often evokes high-arousal or activating emotions of people, so the emotions of news comments aroused in the crowd (i.e., social emotion) should not be ignored. Furthermore, it remains to be explored whether there exists a relationship between publisher emotion and social emotion (i.e., dual emotion), and how the dual emotion appears in fake news. In t…
Fake News on social media platforms has attracted a lot of attention in recent times, primarily for events related to politics (2016 US Presidential elections), healthcare (infodemic during COVID-19), to name a few. Various methods have been proposed for detecting Fake News. The approaches span from exploiting techniques related to network analysis, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and the usage of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). In this work, we propose DEAP-FAKED, a knowleDgE grAPh FAKe nEws Detection framework for identifying Fake News. Our approach is a combination of the NLP -- where we e…
Effective detection of fake news has recently attracted significant attention. Current studies have made significant contributions to predicting fake news with less focus on exploiting the relationship (similarity) between the textual and visual information in news articles. Attaching importance to such similarity helps identify fake news stories that, for example, attempt to use irrelevant images to attract readers' attention. In this work, we propose a $\mathsf{S}$imilarity-$\mathsf{A}$ware $\mathsf{F}$ak$\mathsf{E}$ news detection method ($\mathsf{SAFE}$) which investigates multi-modal (tex…
Development of methods to detect fake news (FN) in low-resource languages has been impeded by a lack of training data. In this study, we solve the problem by using only training data from a high-resource language. Our FN-detection system permitted this strategy by applying adversarial learning that transfers the detection knowledge through languages. To assist the knowledge transfer, our system judges the reliability of articles by exploiting source information, which is a cross-lingual feature that represents the credibility of the speaker. In experiments, our system got 3.71% higher accuracy…
Analysing how people react to rumours associated with news in social media is an important task to prevent the spreading of misinformation, which is nowadays widely recognized as a dangerous tendency. In social media conversations, users show different stances and attitudes towards rumourous stories. Some users take a definite stance, supporting or denying the rumour at issue, while others just comment it, or ask for additional evidence related to the veracity of the rumour. On this line, a new shared task has been proposed at SemEval-2017 (Task 8, SubTask A), which is focused on rumour stance…
Breaking news leads to situations of fast-paced reporting in social media, producing all kinds of updates related to news stories, albeit with the caveat that some of those early updates tend to be rumours, i.e., information with an unverified status at the time of posting. Flagging information that is unverified can be helpful to avoid the spread of information that may turn out to be false. Detection of rumours can also feed a rumour tracking system that ultimately determines their veracity. In this paper we introduce a novel approach to rumour detection that learns from the sequential dynam…
Decoupling and Regulating Modality Heads for Fake News Detection under Missing Modality
Soochow University（苏州大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学计算机科学与工程系）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；FiT, Tencent（腾讯FiT）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Education, Zhejiang Normal University（浙江师范大学教育学院）
University of Warwick（华威大学）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）
Rumour stance classification, the task that determines if each tweet in a collection discussing a rumour is supporting, denying, questioning or simply commenting on the rumour, has been attracting substantial interest. Here we introduce a novel approach that makes use of the sequence of transitions observed in tree-structured conversation threads in Twitter. The conversation threads are formed by harvesting users' replies to one another, which results in a nested tree-like structure. Previous work addressing the stance classification task has treated each tweet as a separate unit. Here we anal…
Indian Institute of Technology (BHU)（印度理工学院（瓦拉纳西印度大学分校））
The ambiguities introduced by the recombination of morphemes constructing several possible inflections for a word makes the prediction of syntactic traits in Morphologically Rich Languages (MRLs) a notoriously complicated task. We propose the Multi Task Deep Morphological analyzer (MT-DMA), a character-level neural morphological analyzer based on multitask learning of word-level tag markers for Hindi and Urdu. MT-DMA predicts a set of six morphological tags for words of Indo-Aryan languages: Parts-of-speech (POS), Gender (G), Number (N), Person (P), Case (C), Tense-Aspect-Modality (TAM) marker…
This paper is a contribution to the Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-European Languages (HASOC) 2021 shared task. Social media today is a hotbed of toxic and hateful conversations, in various languages. Recent news reports have shown that current models struggle to automatically identify hate posted in minority languages. Therefore, efficiently curbing hate speech is a critical challenge and problem of interest. We present a multilingual architecture using state-of-the-art transformer language models to jointly learn hate and offensive speech detection across three lang…
L3S Research Center, Leibniz University of Hannover（莱布尼茨汉诺威大学L3S研究中心）；Institute of Computer Science, FORTH-ICS（希腊研究与技术基金会计算机科学研究所）；Dept. of CSE, IIT Patna（印度理工学院巴特那分校计算机科学与工程系）；Chongqing University of Technology（重庆理工大学）；GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne & Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf（科隆莱布尼茨社会科学研究所暨杜塞尔多夫海因里希·海涅大学）
Fact checking is an essential challenge when combating fake news. Identifying documents that agree or disagree with a particular statement (claim) is a core task in this process. In this context, stance detection aims at identifying the position (stance) of a document towards a claim. Most approaches address this task through a 4-class classification model where the class distribution is highly imbalanced. Therefore, they are particularly ineffective in detecting the minority classes (for instance, 'disagree'), even though such instances are crucial for tasks such as fact-checking by providing…
Public trust in science depends on honest and factual communication of scientific papers. However, recent studies have demonstrated a tendency of news media to misrepresent scientific papers by exaggerating their findings. Given this, we present a formalization of and study into the problem of exaggeration detection in science communication. While there are an abundance of scientific papers and popular media articles written about them, very rarely do the articles include a direct link to the original paper, making data collection challenging. We address this by curating a set of labeled press…
Reputed by their low-cost, easy-access, real-time and valuable information, social media also wildly spread unverified or fake news. Rumors can notably cause severe damage on individuals and the society. Therefore, rumor detection on social media has recently attracted tremendous attention. Most rumor detection approaches focus on rumor feature analysis and social features, i.e., metadata in social media. Unfortunately, these features are data-specific and may not always be available, e.g., when the rumor has just popped up and not yet propagated. In contrast, post contents (including images o…
