The Impact of Online Harassment on the Performance of Projects in Crowdfunding

In the consequence-free and anonymous online environment, online harassment has become a serious problem. In many crowdfunding platforms, there exists offensive speech on the project pages, which might force potential funders to leave the discussion and to give up investment. The effect of online harassment on project performance remains unknown. This study attempts to investigate to what extent the textual online harassment score and the project creator’s attitude towards textual online harassment might affect project performance. We constructed a Kickstarter panel dataset consisting of 388,100 projects and designed a novel framework and an algorithm BiLSTM-CNN to extract the textual online harassment score from comments, which can reach column-wise mean ROC AUC of 0.9463. This study contributes to crowdfunding and online harassment literature and provides important implications for reputation management of projects and crowdfunding platform design

Multi-crop Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation

Recently, image-to-image translation methods based on contrastive learning achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks. However, the negatives are sampled from the input feature spaces in the previous work, which makes the negatives lack diversity. Moreover, in the latent space of the embedings,the previous methods ignore domain consistency between the generated image and the real images of target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive learning framework for unpaired image-to-image translation, called MCCUT. We utilize the multi-crop views to generate the negatives via the center-crop and the random-crop, which can improve the diversity of negatives and meanwhile increase the quality of negatives. To constrain the embedings in the deep feature space,, we formulate a new domain consistency loss function, which encourages the generated images to be close to the real images in the embedding space of same domain. Furthermore, we present a dual coordinate channel attention network by embedding positional information into SENet, which called DCSE module. We employ the DCSE module in the design of generator, which makes the generator pays more attention to channels with greater weight. In many image-to-image translation tasks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, and the advantages of our method have been proved through extensive comparison experiments and ablation research