1,857 research outputs found
Quootstrap: Scalable Unsupervised Extraction of Quotation-Speaker Pairs from Large News Corpora via Bootstrapping
We propose Quootstrap, a method for extracting quotations, as well as the
names of the speakers who uttered them, from large news corpora. Whereas prior
work has addressed this problem primarily with supervised machine learning, our
approach follows a fully unsupervised bootstrapping paradigm. It leverages the
redundancy present in large news corpora, more precisely, the fact that the
same quotation often appears across multiple news articles in slightly
different contexts. Starting from a few seed patterns, such as ["Q", said S.],
our method extracts a set of quotation-speaker pairs (Q, S), which are in turn
used for discovering new patterns expressing the same quotations; the process
is then repeated with the larger pattern set. Our algorithm is highly scalable,
which we demonstrate by running it on the large ICWSM 2011 Spinn3r corpus.
Validating our results against a crowdsourced ground truth, we obtain 90%
precision at 40% recall using a single seed pattern, with significantly higher
recall values for more frequently reported (and thus likely more interesting)
quotations. Finally, we showcase the usefulness of our algorithm's output for
computational social science by analyzing the sentiment expressed in our
extracted quotations.Comment: Accepted at the 12th International Conference on Web and Social Media
(ICWSM), 201
BlogForever D2.6: Data Extraction Methodology
This report outlines an inquiry into the area of web data extraction, conducted within the context of blog preservation. The report reviews theoretical advances and practical developments for implementing data extraction. The inquiry is extended through an experiment that demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of implementing some of the suggested approaches. More specifically, the report discusses an approach based on unsupervised machine learning that employs the RSS feeds and HTML representations of blogs. It outlines the possibilities of extracting semantics available in blogs and demonstrates the benefits of exploiting available standards such as microformats and microdata. The report proceeds to propose a methodology for extracting and processing blog data to further inform the design and development of the BlogForever platform
Hyperprior Induced Unsupervised Disentanglement of Latent Representations
We address the problem of unsupervised disentanglement of latent
representations learnt via deep generative models. In contrast to current
approaches that operate on the evidence lower bound (ELBO), we argue that
statistical independence in the latent space of VAEs can be enforced in a
principled hierarchical Bayesian manner. To this effect, we augment the
standard VAE with an inverse-Wishart (IW) prior on the covariance matrix of the
latent code. By tuning the IW parameters, we are able to encourage (or
discourage) independence in the learnt latent dimensions. Extensive
experimental results on a range of datasets (2DShapes, 3DChairs, 3DFaces and
CelebA) show our approach to outperform the -VAE and is competitive with
the state-of-the-art FactorVAE. Our approach achieves significantly better
disentanglement and reconstruction on a new dataset (CorrelatedEllipses) which
introduces correlations between the factors of variation.Comment: AAAI-201
Recommended from our members
Conspiracy in the Time of Corona: Automatic detection of Emerging Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories in Social Media and the News
Abstract
Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive in environments of low confi- dence and low trust. Consequently, it is not surprising that ones related to the Covid-19 pandemic are proliferating given the lack of scientific consensus on the virusâs spread and containment, or on the long term social and economic ramifications of the pandemic. Among the stories currently circulating are ones suggesting that the 5G telecommunication network activates the virus, that the pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by a global cabal, that the virus is a bio-weapon released deliberately by the Chinese, or that Bill Gates is using it as cover to launch a broad vaccination program to facilitate a global surveillance regime. While some may be quick to dismiss these stories as having little impact on real-world behavior, recent events including the destruction of cell phone towers, racially fueled attacks against Asian Americans, demonstrations espousing resistance to public health orders, and wide-scale defiance of scientifically sound public mandates such as those to wear masks and practice social distancing, countermand such conclusions. Inspired by narrative theory, we crawl social media sites and news reports and, through the application of automated machine-learning methods, discover the underlying narrative frame- works supporting the generation of rumors and conspiracy theories. We show how the various narrative frameworks fueling these stories rely on the alignment of otherwise disparate domains of knowledge, and consider how they attach to the broader reporting on the pandemic. These alignments and attachments, which can be monitored in near real-time, may be useful for identifying areas in the news that are particularly vulnerable to reinterpretation by conspiracy theorists. Understanding the dynamics of storytelling on social media and the narrative frameworks that provide the generative basis for these stories may also be helpful for devising methods to disrupt their spread
- âŠ