247 research outputs found
WSDMS: Debunk Fake News via Weakly Supervised Detection of Misinforming Sentences with Contextualized Social Wisdom
In recent years, we witness the explosion of false and unconfirmed
information (i.e., rumors) that went viral on social media and shocked the
public. Rumors can trigger versatile, mostly controversial stance expressions
among social media users. Rumor verification and stance detection are different
yet relevant tasks. Fake news debunking primarily focuses on determining the
truthfulness of news articles, which oversimplifies the issue as fake news
often combines elements of both truth and falsehood. Thus, it becomes crucial
to identify specific instances of misinformation within the articles. In this
research, we investigate a novel task in the field of fake news debunking,
which involves detecting sentence-level misinformation. One of the major
challenges in this task is the absence of a training dataset with
sentence-level annotations regarding veracity. Inspired by the Multiple
Instance Learning (MIL) approach, we propose a model called Weakly Supervised
Detection of Misinforming Sentences (WSDMS). This model only requires bag-level
labels for training but is capable of inferring both sentence-level
misinformation and article-level veracity, aided by relevant social media
conversations that are attentively contextualized with news sentences. We
evaluate WSDMS on three real-world benchmarks and demonstrate that it
outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines in debunking fake news at both
the sentence and article levels
#Bieber + #Blast = #BieberBlast: Early Prediction of Popular Hashtag Compounds
Compounding of natural language units is a very common phenomena. In this
paper, we show, for the first time, that Twitter hashtags which, could be
considered as correlates of such linguistic units, undergo compounding. We
identify reasons for this compounding and propose a prediction model that can
identify with 77.07% accuracy if a pair of hashtags compounding in the near
future (i.e., 2 months after compounding) shall become popular. At longer times
T = 6, 10 months the accuracies are 77.52% and 79.13% respectively. This
technique has strong implications to trending hashtag recommendation since
newly formed hashtag compounds can be recommended early, even before the
compounding has taken place. Further, humans can predict compounds with an
overall accuracy of only 48.7% (treated as baseline). Notably, while humans can
discriminate the relatively easier cases, the automatic framework is successful
in classifying the relatively harder cases.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 9 tables, published in CSCW (Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work and Social Computing) 2016. in Proceedings of 19th ACM
conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW
2016
Neural topic model with reinforcement learning
In recent years, advances in neural variational inference have achieved many successes in text processing. Examples include neural topic models which are typically built upon variational autoencoder (VAE) with an objective of minimising the error of reconstructing original documents based on the learned latent topic vectors. However, minimising reconstruction errors does not necessarily lead to high quality topics. In this paper, we borrow the idea of reinforcement learning and incorporate topic coherence measures as reward signals to guide the learning of a VAE-based topic model. Furthermore, our proposed model is able to automatically separating background words dynamically from topic words, thus eliminating the pre-processing step of filtering infrequent and/or top frequent words, typically required for learning traditional topic models. Experimental results on the 20 Newsgroups and the NIPS datasets show superior performance both on perplexity and topic coherence measure compared to state-of-the-art neural topic models
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