135,043 research outputs found
Discourse Structures Guided Fine-grained Propaganda Identification
Propaganda is a form of deceptive narratives that instigate or mislead the
public, usually with a political purpose. In this paper, we aim to identify
propaganda in political news at two fine-grained levels: sentence-level and
token-level. We observe that propaganda content is more likely to be embedded
in sentences that attribute causality or assert contrast to nearby sentences,
as well as seen in opinionated evaluation, speculation and discussions of
future expectation. Hence, we propose to incorporate both local and global
discourse structures for propaganda discovery and construct two teacher models
for identifying PDTB-style discourse relations between nearby sentences and
common discourse roles of sentences in a news article respectively. We further
devise two methods to incorporate the two types of discourse structures for
propaganda identification by either using teacher predicted probabilities as
additional features or soliciting guidance in a knowledge distillation
framework. Experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that leveraging
guidance from discourse structures can significantly improve both precision and
recall of propaganda content identification.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 202
Analysis and Detection of Information Types of Open Source Software Issue Discussions
Most modern Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) for open source software (OSS)
projects allow users to add comments to issues. Over time, these comments
accumulate into discussion threads embedded with rich information about the
software project, which can potentially satisfy the diverse needs of OSS
stakeholders. However, discovering and retrieving relevant information from the
discussion threads is a challenging task, especially when the discussions are
lengthy and the number of issues in ITSs are vast. In this paper, we address
this challenge by identifying the information types presented in OSS issue
discussions. Through qualitative content analysis of 15 complex issue threads
across three projects hosted on GitHub, we uncovered 16 information types and
created a labeled corpus containing 4656 sentences. Our investigation of
supervised, automated classification techniques indicated that, when prior
knowledge about the issue is available, Random Forest can effectively detect
most sentence types using conversational features such as the sentence length
and its position. When classifying sentences from new issues, Logistic
Regression can yield satisfactory performance using textual features for
certain information types, while falling short on others. Our work represents a
nontrivial first step towards tools and techniques for identifying and
obtaining the rich information recorded in the ITSs to support various software
engineering activities and to satisfy the diverse needs of OSS stakeholders.Comment: 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering
(ICSE2019
Knowledge embedded
How should we account for the contextual variability of knowledge claims? Many philosophers favour an invariantist account on which such contextual variability is due entirely to pragmatic factors, leaving no interesting context-sensitivity in the semantic meaning of ‘know that.’ I reject this invariantist division of labor by arguing that pragmatic invariantists have no principled account of embedded occurrences of ‘S knows/doesn’t know that p’: Occurrences embedded within larger linguistic constructions such as conditional sentences, attitude verbs, expressions of probability, comparatives, and many others, I argue, give rise to a threefold problem of embedded implicatures
Clauses as Semantic Predicates: Difficulties for Possible-Worlds Semantics
The standard view of clauses embedded under attitude verbs or modal predicates is that they act as terms standing for propositions, a view that faces a range of philosophical and linguistic difficulties. Recently an alternative has been explored according to which embedded clauses act semantically as predicates of content-bearing objects. This paper argues that this approach faces serious problems when it is based on possible worlds-semantics. It outlines a development of the approach in terms of truthmaker theory instea
Internalism and the Frege-Geach Problem
According to the established understanding of the Frege-Geach problem, it
is a challenge exclusively for metaethical expressivism. In this paper, I argue that it
is much wider in scope: The problem applies generally to views according to which
moral sentences express moral judgments entailing that one is for or against something, irrespective of what mental states the judgments consist in. In particular, it applies to motivational internalism about moral judgments. Most noteworthy, it applies to cognitivist internalism according to which moral judgments consist in motivating beliefs. Hence, in order for a metaethical view to evade the Frege-Geach problem, it should avoid stating that moral judgments are motivating
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