ContraDoc: Understanding Self-Contradictions in Documents with Large Language Models

In recent times, large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on various document-level tasks such as document classification, summarization, and question-answering. However, research on understanding their capabilities on the task of self-contradictions in long documents has been very limited. In this work, we introduce ContraDoc, the first human-annotated dataset to study self-contradictions in long documents across multiple domains, varying document lengths, self-contradictions types, and scope. We then analyze the current capabilities of four state-of-the-art open-source and commercially available LLMs: GPT3.5, GPT4, PaLM2, and LLaMAv2 on this dataset. While GPT4 performs the best and can outperform humans on this task, we find that it is still unreliable and struggles with self-contradictions that require more nuance and context. We release the dataset and all the code associated with the experiments

Early Detection of Rumor Veracity in Social Media

Rumor spread has become a significant issue in online social networks (OSNs). To mitigate and limit the spread of rumors and its detrimental effects, analyzing, detecting and better understanding rumor dynamics is required. One of the critical steps of studying rumor spread is to identify the level of the rumor truthfulness in its early stage. Understanding and identifying the level of rumor truthfulness helps prevent its viral spread and minimizes the damage a rumor may cause. In this research, we aim to debunk rumors by analyzing, visualizing, and classifying the level of rumor truthfulness from a large number of users that actively engage in rumor spread. First, we create a dataset of rumors that belong to one of five categories: False , Mostly False , True , Mostly True , and Half True . This dataset provides intrinsic characteristics of a rumor: topics, user\u27s sentiment, network structural and content features. Second, we analyze and visualize the characteristics of each rumor category to better understand its features. Third, using theories from social science and psychology, we build a feature set to classify those rumors and identify their truthfulness. The evaluation results on our new dataset show that the approach could effectively detect the truth of rumors as early as seven days. The proposed approach could be used as a valuable tool for existing fact-checking websites, such as Snopes.com or Politifact.com, to detect the veracity of rumors in its early stage automatically and educate OSN users to have a well-informed decision-making process

Automatic Contradiction Detection in Spanish

This paper addresses the lack of automated contradiction detection systems for the Spanish language. The ES-Contradiction dataset was created and contains examples with two pieces of information classified as Compatible, Contradiction, or Unrelated. To the author’s knowledge, a Spanish-language contradiction dataset is non-existent and therefore, the ES-Contradiction dataset fills an important research gap, given Spanish being one of the most widely spoken languages. Moreover, the dataset built includes a fine-grained annotation of the different types of contradictions in the dataset. A baseline system was designed to validate the effectiveness of the dataset. The BETO transformer model was used to build this baseline system, which obtained a good result to detect the three class labels Compatible, Contradiction, or Unrelated.This research work has been partially funded by Generalitat Valenciana through project “SIIA: Tecnologias del lenguaje humano para una sociedad inclusiva, igualitaria, y accesible” with grant reference PROMETEU/2018/089, by the Spanish Government through project RTI2018-094653-B-C22: “Modelang: Modeling the behavior of digital entities by Human Language Technologies”, as well as being partially supported by a grant from the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) and the LIVING-LANG project (RTI2018-094653-B-C21) from the Spanish Government

Overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims. Task 2: Factuality

We present an overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims, with focus on Task 2: Factuality. The task asked to assess whether a given check-worthy claim made by a politician in the context of a debate/speech is factually true, half-true, or false. In terms of data, we focused on debates from the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, as well as on some speeches during and after the campaign (we also provided translations in Arabic), and we relied on comments and factuality judgments from factcheck.org and snopes.com, which we further refined manually. A total of 30 teams registered to participate in the lab, and five of them actually submitted runs. The most successful approaches used by the participants relied on the automatic retrieval of evidence from the Web. Similarities and other relationships between the claim and the retrieved documents were used as input to classifiers in order to make a decision. The best-performing official submissions achieved mean absolute error of .705 and .658 for the English and for the Arabic test sets, respectively. This leaves plenty of room for further improvement, and thus we release all datasets and the scoring scripts, which should enable further research in fact-checking

Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere

We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201

When Reviewers Lock Horn: Finding Disagreement in Scientific Peer Reviews

To this date, the efficacy of the scientific publishing enterprise fundamentally rests on the strength of the peer review process. The journal editor or the conference chair primarily relies on the expert reviewers' assessment, identify points of agreement and disagreement and try to reach a consensus to make a fair and informed decision on whether to accept or reject a paper. However, with the escalating number of submissions requiring review, especially in top-tier Artificial Intelligence (AI) conferences, the editor/chair, among many other works, invests a significant, sometimes stressful effort to mitigate reviewer disagreements. Here in this work, we introduce a novel task of automatically identifying contradictions among reviewers on a given article. To this end, we introduce ContraSciView, a comprehensive review-pair contradiction dataset on around 8.5k papers (with around 28k review pairs containing nearly 50k review pair comments) from the open review-based ICLR and NeurIPS conferences. We further propose a baseline model that detects contradictory statements from the review pairs. To the best of our knowledge, we make the first attempt to identify disagreements among peer reviewers automatically. We make our dataset and code public for further investigations.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, EMNLP 2023 shor

PHEMEPlus : enriching social media rumour verification with external evidence

Work on social media rumour verification utilises signals from posts, their propagation and users involved. Other lines of work target identifying and fact-checking claims based on information from Wikipedia, or trustworthy news articles without considering social media context. However works combining the information from social media with external evidence from the wider web are lacking. To facilitate research in this direction, we release a novel dataset, PHEMEPlus, an extension of the PHEME benchmark, which contains social media conversations as well as relevant external evidence for each rumour. We demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating such evidence in improving rumour verification models. Additionally, as part of the evidence collection, we evaluate various ways of query formulation to identify the most effective method

An NLP Analysis of Health Advice Giving in the Medical Research Literature

Health advice – clinical and policy recommendations – plays a vital role in guiding medical practices and public health policies. Whether or not authors should give health advice in medical research publications is a controversial issue. The proponents of actionable research advocate for the more efficient and effective transmission of science evidence into practice. The opponents are concerned about the quality of health advice in individual research papers, especially that in observational studies. Arguments both for and against giving advice in individual studies indicate a strong need for identifying and accessing health advice, for either practical use or quality evaluation purposes. However, current information services do not support the direct retrieval of health advice. Compared to other natural language processing (NLP) applications, health advice has not been computationally modeled as a language construct either. A new information service for directly accessing health advice should be able to reduce information barriers and to provide external assessment in science communication. This dissertation work built an annotated corpus of scientific claims that distinguishes health advice according to its occurrence and strength. The study developed NLP-based prediction models to identify health advice in the PubMed literature. Using the annotated corpus and prediction models, the study answered research questions regarding the practice of advice giving in medical research literature. To test and demonstrate the potential use of the prediction model, it was used to retrieve health advice regarding the use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a treatment for COVID-19 from LitCovid, a large COVID-19 research literature database curated by the National Institutes of Health. An evaluation of sentences extracted from both abstracts and discussions showed that BERT-based pre-trained language models performed well at detecting health advice. The health advice prediction model may be combined with existing health information service systems to provide more convenient navigation of a large volume of health literature. Findings from the study also show researchers are careful not to give advice solely in abstracts. They also tend to give weaker and non-specific advice in abstracts than in discussions. In addition, the study found that health advice has appeared consistently in the abstracts of observational studies over the past 25 years. In the sample, 41.2% of the studies offered health advice in their conclusions, which is lower than earlier estimations based on analyses of much smaller samples processed manually. In the abstracts of observational studies, journals with a lower impact are more likely to give health advice than those with a higher impact, suggesting the significance of the role of journals as gatekeepers of science communication. For the communities of natural language processing, information science, and public health, this work advances knowledge of the automated recognition of health advice in scientific literature. The corpus and code developed for the study have been made publicly available to facilitate future efforts in health advice retrieval and analysis. Furthermore, this study discusses the ways in which researchers give health advice in medical research articles, knowledge of which could be an essential step towards curbing potential exaggeration in the current global science communication. It also contributes to ongoing discussions of the integrity of scientific output. This study calls for caution in advice-giving in medical research literature, especially in abstracts alone. It also calls for open access to medical research publications, so that health researchers and practitioners can fully review the advice in scientific outputs and its implications. More evaluative strategies that can increase the overall quality of health advice in research articles are needed by journal editors and reviewers, given their gatekeeping role in science communication

Domain-Focused Summarization of Polarized Debates

Due to the exponential growth of Internet use, textual content is increasingly published in online media. In everyday, more and more news content, blog posts, and scientific articles are published to the online volumes and thus open doors for the text summarization research community to conduct research on those areas. Whilst there are freely accessible repositories for such content, online debates which have recently become popular have remained largely unexplored. This thesis addresses the challenge in applying text summarization to summarize online debates. We view that the task of summarizing online debates should not only focus on summarization techniques but also should look further on presenting the summaries into the formats favored by users. In this thesis, we present how a summarization system is developed to generate online debate summaries in accordance with a designed output, called the Combination 2. It is the combination of two summaries. The primary objective of the first summary, Chart Summary, is to visualize the debate summary as a bar chart in high-level view. The chart consists of the bars conveying clusters of the salient sentences, labels showing short descriptions of the bars, and numbers of salient sentences conversed in the two opposing sides. The other part, Side-By-Side Summary, linked to the Chart Summary, shows a more detailed summary of an online debate related to a bar clicked by a user. The development of the summarization system is divided into three processes. In the first process, we create a gold standard dataset of online debates. The dataset contains a collection of debate comments that have been subjectively annotated by 5 judgments. We develop a summarization system with key features to help identify salient sentences in the comments. The sentences selected by the system are evaluated against the annotation results. We found that the system performance outperforms the baseline. The second process begins with the generation of Chart Summary from the salient sentences selected by the system. We propose a framework with two branches where each branch presents either a term-based clustering and the term-based labeling method or X-means based clustering and the MI labeling strategy. Our evaluation results indicate that the X-means clustering approach is a better alternative for clustering. In the last process, we view the generation of Side-By-Side Summary as a contradiction detection task. We create two debate entailment datasets derived from the two clustering approaches and annotate them with the Contradiction and Non-Contradiction relations. We develop a classifier and investigate combinations of features that maximize the F1 scores. Based on the proposed features, we discovered that the combinations of at least two features to the maximum of eight features yield good results