51,362 research outputs found
Fact Checking in Community Forums
Community Question Answering (cQA) forums are very popular nowadays, as they
represent effective means for communities around particular topics to share
information. Unfortunately, this information is not always factual. Thus, here
we explore a new dimension in the context of cQA, which has been ignored so
far: checking the veracity of answers to particular questions in cQA forums. As
this is a new problem, we create a specialized dataset for it. We further
propose a novel multi-faceted model, which captures information from the answer
content (what is said and how), from the author profile (who says it), from the
rest of the community forum (where it is said), and from external authoritative
sources of information (external support). Evaluation results show a MAP value
of 86.54, which is 21 points absolute above the baseline.Comment: AAAI-2018; Fact-Checking; Veracity; Community-Question Answering;
Neural Networks; Distributed Representation
A meta-analysis of state-of-the-art electoral prediction from Twitter data
Electoral prediction from Twitter data is an appealing research topic. It
seems relatively straightforward and the prevailing view is overly optimistic.
This is problematic because while simple approaches are assumed to be good
enough, core problems are not addressed. Thus, this paper aims to (1) provide a
balanced and critical review of the state of the art; (2) cast light on the
presume predictive power of Twitter data; and (3) depict a roadmap to push
forward the field. Hence, a scheme to characterize Twitter prediction methods
is proposed. It covers every aspect from data collection to performance
evaluation, through data processing and vote inference. Using that scheme,
prior research is analyzed and organized to explain the main approaches taken
up to date but also their weaknesses. This is the first meta-analysis of the
whole body of research regarding electoral prediction from Twitter data. It
reveals that its presumed predictive power regarding electoral prediction has
been rather exaggerated: although social media may provide a glimpse on
electoral outcomes current research does not provide strong evidence to support
it can replace traditional polls. Finally, future lines of research along with
a set of requirements they must fulfill are provided.Comment: 19 pages, 3 table
Facts and Fabrications about Ebola: A Twitter Based Study
Microblogging websites like Twitter have been shown to be immensely useful
for spreading information on a global scale within seconds. The detrimental
effect, however, of such platforms is that misinformation and rumors are also
as likely to spread on the network as credible, verified information. From a
public health standpoint, the spread of misinformation creates unnecessary
panic for the public. We recently witnessed several such scenarios during the
outbreak of Ebola in 2014 [14, 1]. In order to effectively counter the medical
misinformation in a timely manner, our goal here is to study the nature of such
misinformation and rumors in the United States during fall 2014 when a handful
of Ebola cases were confirmed in North America. It is a well known convention
on Twitter to use hashtags to give context to a Twitter message (a tweet). In
this study, we collected approximately 47M tweets from the Twitter streaming
API related to Ebola. Based on hashtags, we propose a method to classify the
tweets into two sets: credible and speculative. We analyze these two sets and
study how they differ in terms of a number of features extracted from the
Twitter API. In conclusion, we infer several interesting differences between
the two sets. We outline further potential directions to using this material
for monitoring and separating speculative tweets from credible ones, to enable
improved public health information.Comment: Appears in SIGKDD BigCHat Workshop 201
Fully Automated Fact Checking Using External Sources
Given the constantly growing proliferation of false claims online in recent
years, there has been also a growing research interest in automatically
distinguishing false rumors from factually true claims. Here, we propose a
general-purpose framework for fully-automatic fact checking using external
sources, tapping the potential of the entire Web as a knowledge source to
confirm or reject a claim. Our framework uses a deep neural network with LSTM
text encoding to combine semantic kernels with task-specific embeddings that
encode a claim together with pieces of potentially-relevant text fragments from
the Web, taking the source reliability into account. The evaluation results
show good performance on two different tasks and datasets: (i) rumor detection
and (ii) fact checking of the answers to a question in community question
answering forums.Comment: RANLP-201
Team QCRI-MIT at SemEval-2019 Task 4: Propaganda Analysis Meets Hyperpartisan News Detection
In this paper, we describe our submission to SemEval-2019 Task 4 on
Hyperpartisan News Detection. Our system relies on a variety of engineered
features originally used to detect propaganda. This is based on the assumption
that biased messages are propagandistic in the sense that they promote a
particular political cause or viewpoint. We trained a logistic regression model
with features ranging from simple bag-of-words to vocabulary richness and text
readability features. Our system achieved 72.9% accuracy on the test data that
is annotated manually and 60.8% on the test data that is annotated with distant
supervision. Additional experiments showed that significant performance
improvements can be achieved with better feature pre-processing.Comment: Hyperpartisanship, propaganda, news media, fake news, SemEval-201
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