Incitement Lite for the Nonpublic Forum

The incitement exception set out in Brandenburg v. Ohio defines the authority of the government, acting in its sovereign capacity, to impose criminal punishment on speakers because the content of their advocacy may persuade listeners to commit crimes. Nonpublic forum managers have much greater flexibility than the government-as-sovereign to restrict the private speakers they invite onto their property because the content of their speech may persuade listeners to engage in harmful conduct. In nonpublic forum management, speakers experience no sanctions and, unlike the government-as-sovereign, nonpublic forum managers may close their forums to all private speakers to avoid unwanted speech. This piece argues that, in the context of the nonpublic forum, where the heavy threat of criminal punishment does not exist, some form of “incitement lite,” with elements adjusted to fit the different balance of government authority and individual speech rights and impacts, may better implement the spirit that animates and explains the exception

Understanding image-text relations and news values for multimodal news analysis

The analysis of news dissemination is of utmost importance since the credibility of information and the identification of disinformation and misinformation affect society as a whole. Given the large amounts of news data published daily on the Web, the empirical analysis of news with regard to research questions and the detection of problematic news content on the Web require computational methods that work at scale. Today's online news are typically disseminated in a multimodal form, including various presentation modalities such as text, image, audio, and video. Recent developments in multimodal machine learning now make it possible to capture basic “descriptive” relations between modalities–such as correspondences between words and phrases, on the one hand, and corresponding visual depictions of the verbally expressed information on the other. Although such advances have enabled tremendous progress in tasks like image captioning, text-to-image generation and visual question answering, in domains such as news dissemination, there is a need to go further. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for the computational analysis of multimodal news. We motivate a set of more complex image-text relations as well as multimodal news values based on real examples of news reports and consider their realization by computational approaches. To this end, we provide (a) an overview of existing literature from semiotics where detailed proposals have been made for taxonomies covering diverse image-text relations generalisable to any domain; (b) an overview of computational work that derives models of image-text relations from data; and (c) an overview of a particular class of news-centric attributes developed in journalism studies called news values. The result is a novel framework for multimodal news analysis that closes existing gaps in previous work while maintaining and combining the strengths of those accounts. We assess and discuss the elements of the framework with real-world examples and use cases, setting out research directions at the intersection of multimodal learning, multimodal analytics and computational social sciences that can benefit from our approach

Understanding image-text relations and news values for multimodal news analysis

The analysis of news dissemination is of utmost importance since the credibility of information and the identification of disinformation and misinformation affect society as a whole. Given the large amounts of news data published daily on the Web, the empirical analysis of news with regard to research questions and the detection of problematic news content on the Web require computational methods that work at scale. Today's online news are typically disseminated in a multimodal form, including various presentation modalities such as text, image, audio, and video. Recent developments in multimodal machine learning now make it possible to capture basic “descriptive” relations between modalities–such as correspondences between words and phrases, on the one hand, and corresponding visual depictions of the verbally expressed information on the other. Although such advances have enabled tremendous progress in tasks like image captioning, text-to-image generation and visual question answering, in domains such as news dissemination, there is a need to go further. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for the computational analysis of multimodal news. We motivate a set of more complex image-text relations as well as multimodal news values based on real examples of news reports and consider their realization by computational approaches. To this end, we provide (a) an overview of existing literature from semiotics where detailed proposals have been made for taxonomies covering diverse image-text relations generalisable to any domain; (b) an overview of computational work that derives models of image-text relations from data; and (c) an overview of a particular class of news-centric attributes developed in journalism studies called news values. The result is a novel framework for multimodal news analysis that closes existing gaps in previous work while maintaining and combining the strengths of those accounts. We assess and discuss the elements of the framework with real-world examples and use cases, setting out research directions at the intersection of multimodal learning, multimodal analytics and computational social sciences that can benefit from our approach

A Dutch coreference resolution system with an evaluation on literary fiction

Coreference resolution is the task of identifying descriptions that refer to the same entity. In this paper we consider the task of entity coreference resolution for Dutch with a particular focus on literary texts. We make three main contributions. First, we propose a simplified annotation scheme to reduce annotation effort. This scheme is used for the annotation of a corpus of 107k tokens from 21 contemporary works of literature. Second, we present a rule-based coreference resolution system for Dutch based on the Stanford deterministic multi-sieve coreference architecture and heuristic rules for quote attribution. Our system (dutchcoref) forms a simple but strong baseline and improves on previous systems in shared task evaluations. Finally, we perform an evaluation and error analysis on literary texts which highlights difficult cases of coreference in general, and the literary domain in particular. The code of our system is made available at https://github.com/andreasvc/dutchcoref

A Dutch coreference resolution system with an evaluation on literary fiction

Coreference resolution is the task of identifying descriptions that refer to the same entity. In this paper we consider the task of entity coreference resolution for Dutch with a particular focus on literary texts. We make three main contributions. First, we propose a simplified annotation scheme to reduce annotation effort. This scheme is used for the annotation of a corpus of 107k tokens from 21 contemporary works of literature. Second, we present a rule-based coreference resolution system for Dutch based on the Stanford deterministic multi-sieve coreference architecture and heuristic rules for quote attribution. Our system (dutchcoref) forms a simple but strong baseline and improves on previous systems in shared task evaluations. Finally, we perform an evaluation and error analysis on literary texts which highlights difficult cases of coreference in general, and the literary domain in particular. The code of our system is made available at https://github.com/andreasvc/dutchcoref

Modeling Visual Rhetoric and Semantics in Multimedia

Recent advances in machine learning have enabled computer vision algorithms to model complicated visual phenomena with accuracies unthinkable a mere decade ago. Their high-performance on a plethora of vision-related tasks has enabled computer vision researchers to begin to move beyond traditional visual recognition problems to tasks requiring higher-level image understanding. However, most computer vision research still focuses on describing what images, text, or other media literally portrays. In contrast, in this dissertation we focus on learning how and why such content is portrayed. Rather than viewing media for its content, we recast the problem as understanding visual communication and visual rhetoric. For example, the same content may be portrayed in different ways in order to present the story the author wishes to convey. We thus seek to model not only the content of the media, but its authorial intent and latent messaging. Understanding how and why visual content is portrayed a certain way requires understanding higher level abstract semantic concepts which are themselves latent within visual media. By latent, we mean the concept is not readily visually accessible within a single image (e.g. right vs left political bias), in contrast to explicit visual semantic concepts such as objects. Specifically, we study the problems of modeling photographic style (how professional photographers portray their subjects), understanding visual persuasion in image advertisements, modeling political bias in multimedia (image and text) news articles, and learning cross-modal semantic representations. While most past research in vision and natural language processing studies the case where visual content and paired text are highly aligned (as in the case of image captions), we target the case where each modality conveys complementary information to tell a larger story. We particularly focus on the problem of learning cross-modal representations from multimedia exhibiting weak alignment between the image and text modalities. A variety of techniques are presented which improve modeling of multimedia rhetoric in real-world data and enable more robust artificially intelligent systems

Studying muslim stereotyping through microportrait extraction

Research from communication science has shown that stereotypical ideas are often reflected in language use. Media coverage of different groups in society influences the perception people have about these groups and even increases distrust and polarization among different groups. Investigating the forms of (especially subtle) stereotyping can raise awareness to journalists and help prevent reinforcing oppositions between groups in society. Conducting large-scale, deep investigations to determine whether we are faced with stereotyping is time-consuming and costly. We propose to tackle this challenges through the means of microportraits: an impression of a target group or individual conveyed in a single text. We introduce the first system implementation for Dutch and show that microportraits allow social scientists to explore various dimensions of stereotyping. We explore the possibilities provided by microportraits by investigating stereotyping of Muslims in the Dutch media. Our (preliminary) results show that microportraits provide more detailed insights into stereotyping compared to more basic models such as word clouds