Spain

The rapid advancement of technology in online communication via social media platforms has led to a prolific rise in the spread of misinformation and fake news. Fake news is especially rampant in the current COVID-19 pandemic, leading to people believing in false and potentially harmful claims and stories. Detecting fake news quickly can alleviate the spread of panic, chaos and potential health hazards. We developed a two stage automated pipeline for COVID-19 fake news detection using state of the art machine learning models for natural language processing. The first model leverages a novel fact checking algorithm that retrieves the most relevant facts concerning user claims about particular COVID-19 claims. The second model verifies the level of ``truth” in the claim by computing the textual entailment between the claim and the true facts retrieved from a manually curated COVID-19 dataset. The dataset is based on a publicly available knowledge source consisting of more than 5000 COVID-19 false claims and verified explanations, a subset of which was internally annotated and cross-validated to train and evaluate our models. We evaluate a series of models based on classical text-based features to more contextual Transformer based models and observe that a model pipeline based on BERT and ALBERT for the two stages respectively yields the best results.

COLING 2020

Two Stage Transformer Model for COVID-19 Fake News Detection and Fact Checking

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

Fake news and deceptive machine-generated text are serious problems threatening modern societies, including in the Arab world. This motivates work on detecting false and manipulated stories online. However, a bottleneck for this research is lack of sufficient data to train detection models. We present a novel method for automatically generating Arabic manipulated (and potentially fake) news stories. Our method is simple and only depends on availability of true stories, which are abundant online, and a part of speech tagger (POS). To facilitate future work, we dispense with both of these requirements altogether by providing AraNews, a novel and large POS-tagged news dataset that can be used off-the-shelf. Using stories generated based on AraNews, we carry out a human annotation study that casts light on the effects of machine manipulation on text veracity. The study also measures human ability to detect Arabic machine manipulated text generated by our method. Finally, we develop the first models for detecting manipulated Arabic news and achieve state-of-the-art results on Arabic fake news detection (macro F1=70.06). Our models and data are publicly available.

Machine Generation and Detection of Arabic Manipulated and Fake News

Research in Computational Linguistics is dependent on text corpora for training and testing new tools and methodologies. While there exists a plethora of annotated linguistic information, these corpora are often not interoperable without significant manual work. Moreover, these annotations might have evolved into different versions, making it challenging for researchers to know the data's provenance. This paper addresses this issue with a case study on event annotated corpora and by creating a new, more interoperable representation of this data in the form of nanopublications. We demonstrate how linguistic annotations from separate corpora can be reliably linked from the start, and thereby be accessed and queried as if they were a single dataset. We describe how such nanopublications can be created and demonstrate how SPARQL queries can be performed to extract interesting content from the new representations. The queries show that information of multiple corpora can be retrieved more easily and effectively because the information of different corpora is represented in a uniform data format.

Provenance for Linguistic Corpora Through Nanopublications

We analyze reference phenomena in a corpus of robot-assisted disaster response team communication. The annotation scheme we designed for this purpose distinguishes different types of entities, roles, reference units and relations. We focus particularly on mission-relevant objects, locations and actors and also annotate a rich set of reference links, including co-reference and various other kinds of relations. We explain the main categories used in our annotation and discuss challenging cases.

Reference in Team Communication for Robot-Assisted Disaster Response: An Initial Analysis

In 2019, about 293 billion emails were sent worldwide every day. They are a valuable source of information and knowledge for professionals. Since the 90’s, many studies have been done on emails and have highlighted the need for resources regarding numerous NLP tasks. Due to the lack of available resources for French, very few studies on emails have been conducted. Anaphora resolution in emails is an unexplored area, annotated resources are needed, at least to answer a first question: Does email communication have specifics that must be addressed to tackle the anaphora resolution task? In order to answer this question 1) we build a French emails corpus composed of 100 anonymized professional threads and make it vailable freely for scientific exploitation. 2) we provide annotations of anaphoric links in the email collection.

A dataset fo anaphora analysis in French Emails

Until recently, coreference resolution has been a critical task on the pipeline of any NLP task involving deep language understanding, such as machine translation, chatbots, summarization or sentiment analysis. However, nowadays, those end tasks are learned end-to-end by deep neural networks without adding any explicit knowledge about coreference. Thus, coreference resolution is used less in the training of other NLP tasks or trending pretrained language models. In this paper we present a new approach to face coreference resolution as a sequence to sequence task based on the Transformer architecture. This approach is simple and universal, compatible with any language or dataset (regardless of singletons) and easier to integrate with current language models architectures. We test it on the ARRAU corpus, where we get 65.6 F1 CoNLL. We see this approach not as a final goal, but a means to pretrain sequence to sequence language models (T5) on coreference resolution.

Sequence to Sequence Coreference Resolution

It is known that word embeddings exhibit biases inherited from the corpus, and those biases reflect social stereotypes. Recently, many studies have been conducted to analyze and mitigate biases in word embeddings. Unsupervised Bias Enumeration (UBE) (Swinger et al., 2019) is one of approach to analyze biases for English, and Hard Debias (Bolukbasi et al., 2016) is the common technique to mitigate gender bias. These methods focused on English, or, in smaller extent, on Indo-European languages. However, it is not clear whether these methods can be generalized to other languages. In this paper, we apply these analyzing and mitigating methods, UBE and Hard Debias, to Japanese word embeddings. Additionally, we examine whether these methods can be used for Japanese. We experimentally show that UBE and Hard Debias cannot be sufficiently adapted to Japanese embeddings.

Can Existing Methods Debias Languages Other than English? First Attempt to Analyze and Mitigate Japanese Word Embeddings

In this paper, we present two productive and functional recommender methods to improve the ac-curacy of predicting the right product for the user. One proposal is a survey-based recommender system that uses k-nearest neighbors. It recommends products by asking questions from the user, efficiently applying a binary product vector to the product attributes, and processing the request with a minimum error. The second proposal uses an enriched collaborative-based recommender system using enriched weighted vectors. Thanks to the style rules, the enriched collaborative-based method recommends outfits with competitive recommendation quality. We evaluated both of the proposals on a Kaggle fashion-dataset along with iMaterialist and, results show equivalent performance on binary gender and product attributes.

E-Commerce Content and Collaborative-based Recommendation using K-Nearest Neighbors and Enriched Weighted Vectors

Many NLP technologies are driven by data and knowledges, including linguistic data, business data as well as domain knowledges. In e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba's ecosystem, these data and knowledges are generated, processed and utilized to train machine learning models and systems for various applications such as information extraction, text generation, question answer, dialogue system and translation. etc.. Overall, the progress in NLP technologies, accumulation of data and knowledges as well as powerful NLP platforms make it easy to do business anywhere.

NLP Technologies and Applications for e-Commerce

This paper presents the results and findings of the Financial Narrative Summarisation shared task (FNS 2020) on summarising UK annual reports. The shared task was organised as part of the 1st Financial Narrative Processing and Financial Narrative Summarisation Workshop (FNP-FNS 2020). The shared task included one main task which is the use of either abstractive or extractive summarisation methodologies and techniques to automatically summarise UK financial annual reports. FNS summarisation shared task is the first to target financial annual reports. The data for the shared task was created and collected from publicly available UK annual reports published by firms listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). A total number of 24 systems from 9 different teams participated in the shared task. In addition we had 2 baseline summarisers and additional 2 topline summarisers to help evaluate and compare against the results of the participants.

The Financial Narrative Summarisation Shared Task (FNS 2020)

This is an introductory tutorial to UCCA (Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation), a cross-linguistically applicable framework for semantic representation, with corpora annotated in English, German and French, and ongoing annotation in Russian and Hebrew. UCCA builds on extensive typological work and supports rapid annotation. The tutorial will provide a detailed introduction to the UCCA annotation guidelines, design philosophy and the available resources; and a comparison to other meaning representations. It will also survey the existing parsing work, including the findings of three recent shared tasks, in SemEval and CoNLL, that addressed UCCA parsing. Finally, the tutorial will present recent applications and extensions to the scheme, demonstrating its value for natural language processing in a range of languages and domains.

Two Stage Transformer Model for COVID-19 Fake News Detection and Fact Checking

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Machine Generation and Detection of Arabic Manipulated and Fake News

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Two Stage Transformer Model for COVID-19 Fake News Detection and Fact Checking

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Next from COLING 2020

Machine Generation and Detection of Arabic Manipulated and Fake News

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A Review of dataset and labeling methods for causality extraction

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