Mapping (Dis-)Information Flow about the MH17 Plane Crash

Digital media enables not only fast sharing of information, but also disinformation. One prominent case of an event leading to circulation of disinformation on social media is the MH17 plane crash. Studies analysing the spread of information about this event on Twitter have focused on small, manually annotated datasets, or used proxys for data annotation. In this work, we examine to what extent text classifiers can be used to label data for subsequent content analysis, in particular we focus on predicting pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian Twitter content related to the MH17 plane crash. Even though we find that a neural classifier improves over a hashtag based baseline, labeling pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian content with high precision remains a challenging problem. We provide an error analysis underlining the difficulty of the task and identify factors that might help improve classification in future work. Finally, we show how the classifier can facilitate the annotation task for human annotators

Graph-based Approaches to Text Generation

Deep Learning advances have enabled more fluent and flexible text generation. However, while these neural generative approaches were initially successful in tasks such as machine translation, they face problems – such as unfaithfulness to the source, repetition and incoherence – when applied to generation tasks where the input is structured data, such as graphs. Generating text from graph-based data, including Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) or Knowledge Graphs (KG), is a challenging task due to the inherent difficulty of properly encoding the input graph while maintaining its original semantic structure. Previous work requires linearizing the input graph, which makes it complicated to properly capture the graph structure since the linearized representation weakens structural information by diluting the explicit connectivity, particularly when the graph structure is complex. This thesis makes an attempt to tackle these issues focusing on two major challenges: first, the creation and improvement of neural text generation systems that can better operate when consuming graph-based input data. Second, we examine text-to-text pretrained language models for graph-to-text generation, including multilingual generation, and present possible methods to adapt these models pretrained on natural language to graph-structured data. In the first part of this thesis, we investigate how to directly exploit graph structures for text generation. We develop novel graph-to-text methods with the capability of incorporating the input graph structure into the learned representations, enhancing the quality of the generated text. For AMR-to-text generation, we present a dual encoder, which incorporates different graph neural network methods, to capture complementary perspectives of the AMR graph. Next, we propose a new KG-to-text framework that learns richer contextualized node embeddings, combining global and local node contexts. We thus introduce a parameter-efficient mechanism for inserting the node connections into the Transformer architecture operating with shortest path lengths between nodes, showing strong performance while using considerably fewer parameters. The second part of this thesis focuses on pretrained language models for text generation from graph-based input data. We first examine how encoder-decoder text-to-text pretrained language models perform in various graph-to-text tasks and propose different task-adaptive pretraining strategies for improving their downstream performance. We then propose a novel structure-aware adapter method that allows to directly inject the input graph structure into pretrained models, without updating their parameters and reducing their reliance on specific representations of the graph structure. Finally, we investigate multilingual text generation from AMR structures, developing approaches that can operate in languages beyond English

A Survey of Recent Advances in Particle Filters and Remaining Challenges for Multitarget Tracking

[EN]We review some advances of the particle filtering (PF) algorithm that have been achieved in the last decade in the context of target tracking, with regard to either a single target or multiple targets in the presence of false or missing data. The first part of our review is on remarkable achievements that have been made for the single-target PF from several aspects including importance proposal, computing efficiency, particle degeneracy/impoverishment and constrained/multi-modal systems. The second part of our review is on analyzing the intractable challenges raised within the general multitarget (multi-sensor) tracking due to random target birth and termination, false alarm, misdetection, measurement-to-track (M2T) uncertainty and track uncertainty. The mainstream multitarget PF approaches consist of two main classes, one based on M2T association approaches and the other not such as the finite set statistics-based PF. In either case, significant challenges remain due to unknown tracking scenarios and integrated tracking management

Optimization and Applications of Modern Wireless Networks and Symmetry

Due to the future demands of wireless communications, this book focuses on channel coding, multi-access, network protocol, and the related techniques for IoT/5G. Channel coding is widely used to enhance reliability and spectral efficiency. In particular, low-density parity check (LDPC) codes and polar codes are optimized for next wireless standard. Moreover, advanced network protocol is developed to improve wireless throughput. This invokes a great deal of attention on modern communications