Fake Opinion Detection: How Similar are Crowdsourced Datasets to Real Data?

[EN] Identifying deceptive online reviews is a challenging tasks for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Collecting corpora for the task is difficult, because normally it is not possible to know whether reviews are genuine. A common workaround involves collecting (supposedly) truthful reviews online and adding them to a set of deceptive reviews obtained through crowdsourcing services. Models trained this way are generally successful at discriminating between `genuine¿ online reviews and the crowdsourced deceptive reviews. It has been argued that the deceptive reviews obtained via crowdsourcing are very different from real fake reviews, but the claim has never been properly tested. In this paper, we compare (false) crowdsourced reviews with a set of `real¿ fake reviews published on line. We evaluate their degree of similarity and their usefulness in training models for the detection of untrustworthy reviews. We find that the deceptive reviews collected via crowdsourcing are significantly different from the fake reviews published online. In the case of the artificially produced deceptive texts, it turns out that their domain similarity with the targets affects the models¿ performance, much more than their untruthfulness. This suggests that the use of crowdsourced datasets for opinion spam detection may not result in models applicable to the real task of detecting deceptive reviews. As an alternative method to create large-size datasets for the fake reviews detection task, we propose methods based on the probabilistic annotation of unlabeled texts, relying on the use of meta-information generally available on the e-commerce sites. Such methods are independent from the content of the reviews and allow to train reliable models for the detection of fake reviews.Leticia Cagnina thanks CONICET for the continued financial support. This work was funded by MINECO/FEDER (Grant No. SomEMBED TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P). The work of Paolo Rosso was partially funded by the MISMIS-FAKEnHATE Spanish MICINN research project (PGC2018-096212-B-C31). Massimo Poesio was in part supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (Grant Number ES/M010236/1).Fornaciari, T.; Cagnina, L.; Rosso, P.; Poesio, M. (2020). Fake Opinion Detection: How Similar are Crowdsourced Datasets to Real Data?. Language Resources and Evaluation. 54(4):1019-1058. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-020-09486-5S10191058544Baeza-Yates, R. (2018). Bias on the web. Communications of the ACM, 61(6), 54–61.Banerjee, S., & Chua, A. Y. (2014). Applauses in hotel reviews: Genuine or deceptive? In: Science and Information Conference (SAI), 2014 (pp. 938–942). New York: IEEE.Bhargava, R., Baoni, A., & Sharma, Y. (2018). Composite sequential modeling for identifying fake reviews. Journal of Intelligent Systems,. https://doi.org/10.1515/jisys-2017-0501.Bickel, P. J., & Doksum, K. A. (2015). Mathematical statistics: Basic ideas and selected topics (2nd ed., Vol. 1). Boca Raton: Chapman and Hall/CRC Press.Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent dirichlet allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3(Jan), 993–1022.Blum, A., & Mitchell, T. (1998). Combining labeled and unlabeled data with co-training. In: Proceedings of the eleventh annual conference on computational learning theory (pp. 92–100). New York: ACM.Cagnina, L. C., & Rosso, P. (2017). Detecting deceptive opinions: Intra and cross-domain classification using an efficient representation. International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems, 25(Suppl. 2), 151–174. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218488517400165.Cardoso, E. F., Silva, R. M., & Almeida, T. A. (2018). Towards automatic filtering of fake reviews. Neurocomputing, 309, 106–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2018.04.074.Carpenter, B. (2008). Multilevel bayesian models of categorical data annotation. Retrieved from http://lingpipe.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/carp-bayesian-multilevel-annotation.pdf.Cortes, C., & Vapnik, V. (1995). Support-vector networks. Machine Learning, 20, 273–297.Costa, P. T., & MacCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO personality inventory (NEO PI-R) and NEO five-factor inventory (NEO FFI): Professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.Dawid, A. P., & Skene, A. M. (1979). Maximum likelihood estimation of observer error-rates using the EM algorithm. Applied Statistics, 28(1), 20–28.Dempster, A. P., Laird, N. M., & Rubin, D. B. (1977). Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM algorithm. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B (Methodological), 39(1), 1–38.Elkan, C., & Noto, K. (2008). Learning classifiers from only positive and unlabeled data. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 213–220). New York: ACM.Fei, G., Mukherjee, A., Liu, B., Hsu, M., Castellanos, M., & Ghosh, R. (2013). Exploiting burstiness in reviews for review spammer detection. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (Vol. 13, pp. 175–184).Feng, S., Banerjee, R., & Choi, Y. (2012). Syntactic stylometry for deception detection. In: Proceedings of the 50th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics (Vol. 2: Short Papers, pp. 171–175). Jeju Island: Association for Computational Linguistics.Forman, G. (2003). An extensive empirical study of feature selection metrics for text classification. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3, 1289–1305.Fornaciari, T., & Poesio, M. (2013). Automatic deception detection in Italian court cases. Artificial intelligence and law, 21(3), 303–340. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-013-9140-4.Fornaciari, T., & Poesio, M. (2014). Identifying fake amazon reviews as learning from crowds. In: Proceedings of the 14th conference of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 279–287). Gothenburg: Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved from http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E14-1030.Gelman, A., & Hill, J. (2007). Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models., Analytical methods for social research Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Graves, A., Jaitly, N., & Mohamed, A. R. (2013). Hybrid speech recognition with deep bidirectional LSTM. In: 2013 IEEE workshop on automatic speech recognition and understanding (ASRU) (pp. 273–278). New York: IEEE.Hernández-Castañeda, Á., & Calvo, H. (2017). Deceptive text detection using continuous semantic space models. Intelligent Data Analysis, 21(3), 679–695.Hernández Fusilier, D., Guzmán, R., Móntes y Gomez, M., & Rosso, P. (2013). Using pu-learning to detect deceptive opinion spam. In: Proc. of the 4th workshop on computational approaches to subjectivity, sentiment and social media analysis (pp. 38–45).Hernández Fusilier, D., Montes-y Gómez, M., Rosso, P., & Cabrera, R. G. (2015). Detecting positive and negative deceptive opinions using pu-learning. Information Processing & Management, 51(4), 433–443.Hovy, D. (2016). The enemy in your own camp: How well can we detect statistically-generated fake reviews–an adversarial study. In: The 54th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics (p 351).Jelinek, F., Lafferty, J. D., & Mercer, R. L. (1992). Basic methods of probabilistic context free grammars. Speech recognition and understanding (pp. 345–360). New York: Springer.Jindal, N., & Liu, B. (2008). Opinion spam and analysis. In: Proceedings of the 2008 international conference on web search and data mining (pp. 219–230). New York: ACM.Karatzoglou, A., Meyer, D., & Hornik, K. (2006). Support vector machines in R. Journal of Statistical Software, 15(9), 1–28.Kim, S., Lee, S., Park, D., & Kang, J. (2017). Constructing and evaluating a novel crowdsourcing-based paraphrased opinion spam dataset. In: Proceedings of the 26th international conference on world wide web (pp. 827–836). Geneva: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.Li, F., Huang, M., Yang, Y., & Zhu, X. (2011). Learning to identify review spam. IJCAI Proceedings-International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 22(3), 2488–2493.Li, H., Chen, Z., Liu, B., Wei, X., & Shao, J. (2014a). Spotting fake reviews via collective positive-unlabeled learning. In: 2014 IEEE international conference on data mining (ICDM) (pp. 899–904). New York: IEEE.Li, H., Fei, G., Wang, S., Liu, B., Shao, W., Mukherjee, A., & Shao, J. (2017). Bimodal distribution and co-bursting in review spam detection. In: Proceedings of the 26th international conference on world wide web (pp. 1063–1072). Geneva: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.Li, H., Liu, B., Mukherjee, A., & Shao, J. (2014b). Spotting fake reviews using positive-unlabeled learning. Computación y Sistemas, 18(3), 467–475.Li, J., Ott, M., Cardie, C., & Hovy, E. H. (2014c). Towards a general rule for identifying deceptive opinion spam. In: ACL (Vol. 1, pp. 1566–1576).Lin, C. H., Hsu, P. Y., Cheng, M. S., Lei, H. T., & Hsu, M. C. (2017). Identifying deceptive review comments with rumor and lie theories. In: International conference in swarm intelligence (pp. 412–420). New York: Springer.Liu, B., Dai, Y., Li, X., Lee, W. S., & Yu, P. S. (2003). Building text classifiers using positive and unlabeled examples. In: Third IEEE international conference on data mining (pp. 179–186). New York: IEEE.Liu, B., Lee, W. S., Yu, P. S., & Li, X. (2002). Partially supervised classification of text documents. ICML, 2, 387–394.Martens, D., & Maalej, W. (2019). Towards understanding and detecting fake reviews in app stores. Empirical Software Engineering,. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09706-9.Mikolov, T., Chen, K., Corrado, G., & Dean, J. (2013). Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space. arXiv preprint arXiv:13013781.Mukherjee, A., Kumar, A., Liu, B., Wang, J., Hsu, M., Castellanos, M., & Ghosh, R. (2013a). Spotting opinion spammers using behavioral footprints. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 632–640) New York: ACM.Mukherjee, A., Venkataraman, V., Liu, B., & Glance, N. S. (2013b). What yelp fake review filter might be doing? In: Proceedings of the seventh international AAAI conference on weblogs and social media.Negri, M., Bentivogli, L., Mehdad, Y., Giampiccolo, D., & Marchetti, A. (2011). Divide and conquer: Crowdsourcing the creation of cross-lingual textual entailment corpora. In: Proceedings of the conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (pp. 670–679). Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics.Ott, M., Cardie, C., & Hancock, J. T. (2013). Negative deceptive opinion spam. In: Proceedings of the 2013 conference of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics: human language technologies (pp. 497–501).Ott, M., Choi, Y., Cardie, C., & Hancock, J. (2011). Finding deceptive opinion spam by any stretch of the imagination. In: Proceedings of the 49th Annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics: human language technologies (pp. 309–319). Portland, Oregon: Association for Computational Linguistics.Pennebaker, J. W., Francis, M. E., & Booth, R. J. (2001). Linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC): LIWC2001. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Pennington, J., Socher, R., & Manning, C. (2014). Glove: Global vectors for word representation. In: Proceedings of the 2014 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (EMNLP) (pp. 1532–1543).Raykar, V. C., Yu, S., Zhao, L. H., Valadez, G. H., Florin, C., Bogoni, L., et al. (2010). Learning from crowds. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 11, 1297–1322.Ren, Y., & Ji, D. (2017). Neural networks for deceptive opinion spam detection: An empirical study. Information Sciences, 385, 213–224.Rout, J. K., Dalmia, A., Choo, K. K. R., Bakshi, S., & Jena, S. K. (2017). Revisiting semi-supervised learning for online deceptive review detection. IEEE Access, 5(1), 1319–1327.Saini, M., & Sharan, A. (2017). Ensemble learning to find deceptive reviews using personality traits and reviews specific features. Journal of Digital Information Management, 12(2), 84–94.Salloum, W., Edwards, E., Ghaffarzadegan, S., Suendermann-Oeft, D., & Miller, M. (2017). Crowdsourced continuous improvement of medical speech recognition. In: The AAAI-17 workshop on crowdsourcing, deep learning, and artificial intelligence agents.Schmid, H. (1994). Probabilistic part-of-speech tagging using decision trees. In: Proceedings of international conference on new methods in language processing. Retrieved from http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/ftp/pub/corpora/tree-tagger1.pdf.Shehnepoor, S., Salehi, M., Farahbakhsh, R., & Crespi, N. (2017). Netspam: A network-based spam detection framework for reviews in online social media. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 12(7), 1585–1595.Skeppstedt, M., Peldszus, A., & Stede, M. (2018). More or less controlled elicitation of argumentative text: Enlarging a microtext corpus via crowdsourcing. In: Proceedings of the 5th workshop on argument mining (pp. 155–163).Strapparava, C., & Mihalcea, R. (2009). The lie detector: Explorations in the automatic recognition of deceptive language. In: Proceedings of the 47th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics and the 4th international joint conference on natural language processing.Streitfeld, D. (August $$25{{\rm th}}$$, 2012). The best book reviews money can buy. The New York Times.Whitehill, J., Wu, T., Bergsma, F., Movellan, J. R., & Ruvolo, P. L. (2009). Whose vote should count more: Optimal integration of labels from labelers of unknown expertise. Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 2035–2043). Cambridge: MIT Press.Xie, S., Wang, G., Lin, S., & Yu, P. S. (2012). Review spam detection via temporal pattern discovery. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (pp 823–831). New York: ACM.Yang, Y., & Liu, X. (1999). A re-examination of text categorization methods. In: Proceedings of the 22nd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, SIGIR ’99 (pp. 42–49). New York: ACM.Zhang, W., Bu, C., Yoshida, T., & Zhang, S. (2016). Cospa: A co-training approach for spam review identification with support vector machine. Information, 7(1), 12.Zhang, W., Du, Y., Yoshida, T., & Wang, Q. (2018). DRI-RCNN: An approach to deceptive review identification using recurrent convolutional neural network. Information Processing & Management, 54(4), 576–592.Zhou, L., Shi, Y., & Zhang, D. (2008). A Statistical Language Modeling Approach to Online Deception Detection. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 20(8), 1077–1081

A Methodological Template to Construct Ground Truth of Authentic and Fake Online Reviews

With the emergence of opinion spam, scholars in recent years have been investigating how to distinguish between authentic and fake online reviews. In this research area however, constructing ground truth has been a tricky problem. When labeled datasets of authentic and fake reviews are unavailable, it becomes impossible to systematically investigate differences between the two. In light of this problem, the goal of this paper is three-fold: (1) To review existing approaches of developing ground truth, (2) To present an improved methodological template to construct ground truth, and (3) To conduct a quality-check of the newly constructed ground truth. The existing approaches are dissected to identify several peculiarities. The new approach invests in mitigating pitfalls in the current approaches. In the newly constructed ground truth, authentic reviews were found to be not easily distinguishable from fake reviews. Finally, new research directions are identified with the hope that scholars would be able to stay ahead in their relentless race against spammers

Enhancing knowledge acquisition systems with user generated and crowdsourced resources

This thesis is on leveraging knowledge acquisition systems with collaborative data and crowdsourcing work from internet. We propose two strategies and apply them for building effective entity linking and question answering (QA) systems. The first strategy is on integrating an information extraction system with online collaborative knowledge bases, such as Wikipedia and Freebase. We construct a Cross-Lingual Entity Linking (CLEL) system to connect Chinese entities, such as people and locations, with corresponding English pages in Wikipedia. The main focus is to break the language barrier between Chinese entities and the English KB, and to resolve the synonymy and polysemy of Chinese entities. To address those problems, we create a cross-lingual taxonomy and a Chinese knowledge base (KB). We investigate two methods of connecting the query representation with the KB representation. Based on our CLEL system participating in TAC KBP 2011 evaluation, we finally propose a simple and effective generative model, which achieved much better performance. The second strategy is on creating annotation for QA systems with the help of crowd- sourcing. Crowdsourcing is to distribute a task via internet and recruit a lot of people to complete it simultaneously. Various annotated data are required to train the data-driven statistical machine learning algorithms for underlying components in our QA system. This thesis demonstrates how to convert the annotation task into crowdsourcing micro-tasks, investigate different statistical methods for enhancing the quality of crowdsourced anno- tation, and finally use enhanced annotation to train learning to rank models for passage ranking algorithms for QA.Gegenstand dieser Arbeit ist das Nutzbarmachen sowohl von Systemen zur Wissener- fassung als auch von kollaborativ erstellten Daten und Arbeit aus dem Internet. Es werden zwei Strategien vorgeschlagen, welche für die Erstellung effektiver Entity Linking (Disambiguierung von Entitätennamen) und Frage-Antwort Systeme eingesetzt werden. Die erste Strategie ist, ein Informationsextraktions-System mit kollaborativ erstellten Online- Datenbanken zu integrieren. Wir entwickeln ein Cross-Linguales Entity Linking-System (CLEL), um chinesische Entitäten, wie etwa Personen und Orte, mit den entsprechenden Wikipediaseiten zu verknüpfen. Das Hauptaugenmerk ist es, die Sprachbarriere zwischen chinesischen Entitäten und englischer Datenbank zu durchbrechen, und Synonymie und Polysemie der chinesis- chen Entitäten aufzulösen. Um diese Probleme anzugehen, erstellen wir eine cross linguale Taxonomie und eine chinesische Datenbank. Wir untersuchen zwei Methoden, die Repräsentation der Anfrage und die Repräsentation der Datenbank zu verbinden. Schließlich stellen wir ein einfaches und effektives generatives Modell vor, das auf unserem System für die Teilnahme an der TAC KBP 2011 Evaluation basiert und eine erheblich bessere Performanz erreichte. Die zweite Strategie ist, Annotationen für Frage-Antwort-Systeme mit Hilfe von "Crowd- sourcing" zu erstellen. "Crowdsourcing" bedeutet, eine Aufgabe via Internet an eine große Menge an angeworbene Menschen zu verteilen, die diese simultan erledigen. Verschiedene annotierte Daten sind notwendig, um die datengetriebenen statistischen Lernalgorithmen zu trainieren, die unserem Frage-Antwort System zugrunde liegen. Wir zeigen, wie die Annotationsaufgabe in Mikro-Aufgaben für das Crowdsourcing umgewan- delt werden kann, wir untersuchen verschiedene statistische Methoden, um die Qualität der Annotation aus dem Crowdsourcing zu erweitern, und schließlich nutzen wir die erwei- erte Annotation, um Modelle zum Lernen von Ranglisten von Textabschnitten zu trainieren

Representation learning for dialogue systems

Cette thèse présente une série de mesures prises pour étudier l’apprentissage de représentations (par exemple, l’apprentissage profond) afin de mettre en place des systèmes de dialogue et des agents de conversation virtuels. La thèse est divisée en deux parties générales. La première partie de la thèse examine l’apprentissage des représentations pour les modèles de dialogue génératifs. Conditionnés sur une séquence de tours à partir d’un dialogue textuel, ces modèles ont la tâche de générer la prochaine réponse appropriée dans le dialogue. Cette partie de la thèse porte sur les modèles séquence-à-séquence, qui est une classe de réseaux de neurones profonds génératifs. Premièrement, nous proposons un modèle d’encodeur-décodeur récurrent hiérarchique ("Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder"), qui est une extension du modèle séquence-à-séquence traditionnel incorporant la structure des tours de dialogue. Deuxièmement, nous proposons un modèle de réseau de neurones récurrents multi-résolution ("Multiresolution Recurrent Neural Network"), qui est un modèle empilé séquence-à-séquence avec une représentation stochastique intermédiaire (une "représentation grossière") capturant le contenu sémantique abstrait communiqué entre les locuteurs. Troisièmement, nous proposons le modèle d’encodeur-décodeur récurrent avec variables latentes ("Latent Variable Recurrent Encoder-Decoder"), qui suivent une distribution normale. Les variables latentes sont destinées à la modélisation de l’ambiguïté et l’incertitude qui apparaissent naturellement dans la communication humaine. Les trois modèles sont évalués et comparés sur deux tâches de génération de réponse de dialogue: une tâche de génération de réponses sur la plateforme Twitter et une tâche de génération de réponses de l’assistance technique ("Ubuntu technical response generation task"). La deuxième partie de la thèse étudie l’apprentissage de représentations pour un système de dialogue utilisant l’apprentissage par renforcement dans un contexte réel. Cette partie porte plus particulièrement sur le système "Milabot" construit par l’Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle (Mila) pour le concours "Amazon Alexa Prize 2017". Le Milabot est un système capable de bavarder avec des humains sur des sujets populaires à la fois par la parole et par le texte. Le système consiste d’un ensemble de modèles de récupération et de génération en langage naturel, comprenant des modèles basés sur des références, des modèles de sac de mots et des variantes des modèles décrits ci-dessus. Cette partie de la thèse se concentre sur la tâche de sélection de réponse. À partir d’une séquence de tours de dialogues et d’un ensemble des réponses possibles, le système doit sélectionner une réponse appropriée à fournir à l’utilisateur. Une approche d’apprentissage par renforcement basée sur un modèle appelée "Bottleneck Simulator" est proposée pour sélectionner le candidat approprié pour la réponse. Le "Bottleneck Simulator" apprend un modèle approximatif de l’environnement en se basant sur les trajectoires de dialogue observées et le "crowdsourcing", tout en utilisant un état abstrait représentant la sémantique du discours. Le modèle d’environnement est ensuite utilisé pour apprendre une stratégie d’apprentissage du renforcement par le biais de simulations. La stratégie apprise a été évaluée et comparée à des approches concurrentes via des tests A / B avec des utilisateurs réel, où elle démontre d’excellente performance.This thesis presents a series of steps taken towards investigating representation learning (e.g. deep learning) for building dialogue systems and conversational agents. The thesis is split into two general parts. The first part of the thesis investigates representation learning for generative dialogue models. Conditioned on a sequence of turns from a text-based dialogue, these models are tasked with generating the next, appropriate response in the dialogue. This part of the thesis focuses on sequence-to-sequence models, a class of generative deep neural networks. First, we propose the Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder model, which is an extension of the vanilla sequence-to sequence model incorporating the turn-taking structure of dialogues. Second, we propose the Multiresolution Recurrent Neural Network model, which is a stacked sequence-to-sequence model with an intermediate, stochastic representation (a "coarse representation") capturing the abstract semantic content communicated between the dialogue speakers. Third, we propose the Latent Variable Recurrent Encoder-Decoder model, which is a variant of the Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder model with latent, stochastic normally-distributed variables. The latent, stochastic variables are intended for modelling the ambiguity and uncertainty occurring naturally in human language communication. The three models are evaluated and compared on two dialogue response generation tasks: a Twitter response generation task and the Ubuntu technical response generation task. The second part of the thesis investigates representation learning for a real-world reinforcement learning dialogue system. Specifically, this part focuses on the Milabot system built by the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (Mila) for the Amazon Alexa Prize 2017 competition. Milabot is a system capable of conversing with humans on popular small talk topics through both speech and text. The system consists of an ensemble of natural language retrieval and generation models, including template-based models, bag-of-words models, and variants of the models discussed in the first part of the thesis. This part of the thesis focuses on the response selection task. Given a sequence of turns from a dialogue and a set of candidate responses, the system must select an appropriate response to give the user. A model-based reinforcement learning approach, called the Bottleneck Simulator, is proposed for selecting the appropriate candidate response. The Bottleneck Simulator learns an approximate model of the environment based on observed dialogue trajectories and human crowdsourcing, while utilizing an abstract (bottleneck) state representing high-level discourse semantics. The learned environment model is then employed to learn a reinforcement learning policy through rollout simulations. The learned policy has been evaluated and compared to competing approaches through A/B testing with real-world users, where it was found to yield excellent performance

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today

The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018 : 10-12 December 2018, Torino

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

Natural language processing methods for detecting and measuring the impact of scientific work beyond academia

Scientific research has a profoundly important impact on our society and the environment. However, the multifaceted nature of this impact makes it particularly difficult to measure and, as shown in this thesis, it cannot be measured using traditional academic impact metrics that focus on counting citations and publications. Furthermore, existing societal and environmental impact metrics are only applicable to one scientific discipline or geography or are expensive processes run irregularly by government agencies. This thesis investigates natural language processing methods for identifying and measuring societal and environmental scientific impact and how such impact is reported in the news. A novel regression task and model are presented for identifying and quantifying this impact based on text extracted from scientific papers and news articles that discuss them. This is enabled by developing methods for linking and comparing news articles with academic papers that they discuss, whilst accounting for the structural and linguistic differences between the two types of document. Text encoding strategies for representation and comparison of long documents are also a focus of the thesis. A new cross-domain, co-reference resolution task between news articles and scientific papers is introduced so that co-referring entities may be used as anchors for aligning the two types of documents. Through comparisons of news article excerpts and sentences from corresponding scientific papers, it is shown that scientific discourse structure and argumentation in scientific papers is a likely predictor of which information will be presented prominently in news articles. This work introduces several novel natural language task settings for which no pre existing data sets exist. This has necessitated the production of new human-annotated datasets which were built using bespoke annotation tools that use semi-supervised learning to accelerate the labelling process and minimise the cognitive load of the task on the annotator. The thesis also makes use of low resource approaches including few-shot and multi-task learning to facilitate the development of accurate models with small data-sets. The resulting annotated data-sets, annotation tools and guidelines along with state-of-the art machine learning models are all made available as open assets. This thesis contributes new ways to measure societal and environmental impact of scientific work and help scientists and funding bodies understand how work is being used by others, justify the spending of public funding and inform better public engagement

English machine reading comprehension: new approaches to answering multiple-choice questions

Reading comprehension is often tested by measuring a person or system’s ability to answer questions about a given text. Machine reading comprehension datasets have proliferated in recent years, particularly for the English language. The aim of this thesis is to investigate and improve data-driven approaches to automatic reading comprehension. Firstly, I provide a full classification of question and answer types for the reading comprehension task. I also present a systematic overview of English reading comprehension datasets (over 50 datasets). I observe that the majority of questions were created using crowdsourcing and the most popular data source is Wikipedia. There is also a lack of why, when, and where questions. Additionally, I address the question “What makes a dataset difficult?” and highlight the difference between datasets created for people and datasets created for machine reading comprehension. Secondly, focusing on multiple-choice question answering, I propose a computationally light method for answer selection based on string similarities and logistic regression. At the time (December 2017), the proposed approach showed the best performance on two datasets (MovieQA and MCQA: IJCNLP 2017 Shared Task 5 Multi-choice Question Answering in Examinations) outperforming some CNN-based methods. Thirdly, I investigate methods for Boolean Reading Comprehension tasks including the use of Knowledge Graph (KG) information for answering questions. I provide an error analysis of a transformer model’s performance on the BoolQ dataset. This reveals several important issues such as unstable model behaviour and some issues with the dataset itself. Experiments with incorporating knowledge graph information into a baseline transformer model do not show a clear improvement due to a combination of the model’s ability to capture new information, inaccuracies in the knowledge graph, and imprecision in entity linking. Finally, I develop a Boolean Reading Comprehension dataset based on spontaneously user-generated questions and reviews which is extremely close to a real-life question-answering scenario. I provide a classification of question difficulty and establish a transformer-based baseline for the new proposed dataset