Neural Based Statement Classification for Biased Language

Biased language commonly occurs around topics which are of controversial nature, thus, stirring disagreement between the different involved parties of a discussion. This is due to the fact that for language and its use, specifically, the understanding and use of phrases, the stances are cohesive within the particular groups. However, such cohesiveness does not hold across groups. In collaborative environments or environments where impartial language is desired (e.g. Wikipedia, news media), statements and the language therein should represent equally the involved parties and be neutrally phrased. Biased language is introduced through the presence of inflammatory words or phrases, or statements that may be incorrect or one-sided, thus violating such consensus. In this work, we focus on the specific case of phrasing bias, which may be introduced through specific inflammatory words or phrases in a statement. For this purpose, we propose an approach that relies on a recurrent neural networks in order to capture the inter-dependencies between words in a phrase that introduced bias. We perform a thorough experimental evaluation, where we show the advantages of a neural based approach over competitors that rely on word lexicons and other hand-crafted features in detecting biased language. We are able to distinguish biased statements with a precision of P=0.92, thus significantly outperforming baseline models with an improvement of over 30%. Finally, we release the largest corpus of statements annotated for biased language.Comment: The Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, February 11--15, 2019, Melbourne, VIC, Australi

Improving Entity Retrieval on Structured Data

The increasing amount of data on the Web, in particular of Linked Data, has led to a diverse landscape of datasets, which make entity retrieval a challenging task. Explicit cross-dataset links, for instance to indicate co-references or related entities can significantly improve entity retrieval. However, only a small fraction of entities are interlinked through explicit statements. In this paper, we propose a two-fold entity retrieval approach. In a first, offline preprocessing step, we cluster entities based on the \emph{x--means} and \emph{spectral} clustering algorithms. In the second step, we propose an optimized retrieval model which takes advantage of our precomputed clusters. For a given set of entities retrieved by the BM25F retrieval approach and a given user query, we further expand the result set with relevant entities by considering features of the queries, entities and the precomputed clusters. Finally, we re-rank the expanded result set with respect to the relevance to the query. We perform a thorough experimental evaluation on the Billions Triple Challenge (BTC12) dataset. The proposed approach shows significant improvements compared to the baseline and state of the art approaches

SPATIAL STATISTICAL METHODS IN THE ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC HEALTH DATA

Various studies claim that cancer is likely to be caused by the diverse environmental pollutants; lifestyle, i.e., poor diet, smoking, alcohol, stress, sun exposure, lack of physical activity, non-healthy weight; genetic inheritance; some kind of infections, etc. In most cases, around 90-95% of cancers are due to lifestyle and ecological factors that influence the living organisms. This implies that people affected by cancer most probably are clustered around the most polluted regions, meaning that the geographical location has an effect in the chances of contracting the disease. We use spatial statistical methods to support this and to point out the contrasts in rates that come out from different geographical distributions of the population. After the heart disease, cancer is the second cause of the worldwide deaths, in spite of the intensive research done in the last years. Based on the information on the causes of deaths by group diseases, provided by the Albanian Institute of Statistics INSTAT for the last two decades, this fact is also true in the case of Albania, where on the first place we have the circulatory system diseases with an average of 242 deaths per 100.000 inhabitants a year, followed by an average of 78 deaths per 100.000 inhabitants a year caused by neoplasm. In this study we take into consideration some specific geographical areas and see how the critical points do influence in the higher chance of being affected by cancer. We use correlation to show the relation between number of sick people and air pollution rates

SPATIAL STATISTICAL METHODS IN THE ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC HEALTH DATA

Various studies claim that cancer is likely to be caused by the diverse environmental pollutants; lifestyle, i.e., poor diet, smoking, alcohol, stress, sun exposure, lack of physical activity, non-healthy weight; genetic inheritance; some kind of infections, etc. In most cases, around 90-95% of cancers are due to lifestyle and ecological factors that influence the living organisms. This implies that people affected by cancer most probably are clustered around the most polluted regions, meaning that the geographical location has an effect in the chances of contracting the disease. We use spatial statistical methods to support this and to point out the contrasts in rates that come out from different geographical distributions of the population. After the heart disease, cancer is the second cause of the worldwide deaths, in spite of the intensive research done in the last years. Based on the information on the causes of deaths by group diseases, provided by the Albanian Institute of Statistics INSTAT for the last two decades, this fact is also true in the case of Albania, where on the first place we have the circulatory system diseases with an average of 242 deaths per 100.000 inhabitants a year, followed by an average of 78 deaths per 100.000 inhabitants a year caused by neoplasm. In this study we take into consideration some specific geographical areas and see how the critical points do influence in the higher chance of being affected by cancer. We use correlation to show the relation between number of sick people and air pollution rates

The Effects of Immigrant Consumption Experience Abroad in the Education of Albanian Consumption According to International Gusto and Standards

Going international for a national economy in an increasingly globalization process does not mean just thinking how to export products and services. First, you have to create and implement international standards for the home country products and services. The process of internationalization is an integral process, affecting culture, politics, economy and way of living as well. Going international for an economy is a very broad issue but the way we refer in this paper is very closely related to the living standards of the people and more specifically of the immigrant communities between the host country and the country of origin. There are different ways of rising up and establishing international standards in consumption in the domestic market, one of which sounds to be smooth and very natural considering the transformation process. Consumption is part of the culture and so is the way of living. This means that it should be a long process to adopt international standards of consumption in the internal market. But it is not the same when we consider immigrants and their relatives have intense exchange of experiences with them, and the fact that immigrants are bicultural. They naturally can ‘import’ their second culture elements and standards home. The positive effects of this phenomenon which comes as a result of the process of education of the domestic market from the immigrant consumption experience abroad directly impacts the home market demand for consumption according to the international gusto and standards. Albanian immigrant group have been for many years, and still are very important enclave for the internationalization of our economy, as they represent more than 1/3 of our total population. Having into consideration this fact, the goal of this paper is to analyze the consequences that the domestic market, goods and services, have had so far and how the production standards have evolved. This work is licensed under a&nbsp;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</p

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, SOCIO-CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN KOSOVO

In this paper we are trying to identify causes and consequences of domestic violence in Kosovo. As one of the country in which society is undergoing through the radical transition, Kosovo is faced with different challenges in order to build a state where social and political rights are equal for everyone without taking into consideration genders differences, ages, religion, race, political orientation, language, etc. So far, there have been taken a number of legal responsibilities dealing with domestic violence. Under the pressure of the European Integration, Kosovo has approved the national program against domestic violence, law on the family, Law on Protection from Domestic Violence, different strategy with the international support, and also have an active role of nongovernmental organizations in advocating the gender-based equalities. Domestic violence as a social phenomenon is deeply elaborated by different social scholars as an act that violates human rights and that all human beings are free and with equal rights and dignity. In this paper we will discuss the official data related to domestic violence in Kosovo, going through the cases from deaths, suicide, to child abuse, disturbance, disagreement and different variables. Also, we will explain how is defined the domestic violence in Kosovo, from the dimension of physical abuse to the economic abuse. The main part of this article is analyzing official data from the studies, safety agencies such as: police and justice, and also nongovernmental organizations related to this issue. The aim of the state institutions is to prevent domestic violence, but how is the real situation in the field? Do they protect and secure the victims? Do they offer training and reintegration of the victims? However those data bring us into line with the real situation of domestic violence in Kosovo, regardless of the different perceptions of this phenomenon in our society