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Now showing 1 - 10 of 12
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    Check square at CheckThat! 2020: Claim Detection in Social Media via Fusion of Transformer and Syntactic Features
    (Aachen, Germany : RWTH Aachen, 2020) Cheema, Gullasl S.; Hakimov, Sherzod; Ewerth, Ralph; Cappellato, Linda; Eickhoff, Carsten; Ferro, Nicola; Névéol, Aurélie
    In this digital age of news consumption, a news reader has the ability to react, express and share opinions with others in a highly interactive and fast manner. As a consequence, fake news has made its way into our daily life because of very limited capacity to verify news on the Internet by large companies as well as individuals. In this paper, we focus on solving two problems which are part of the fact-checking ecosystem that can help to automate fact-checking of claims in an ever increasing stream of content on social media. For the first prob-lem, claim check-worthiness prediction, we explore the fusion of syntac-tic features and deep transformer Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) embeddings, to classify check-worthiness of a tweet, i.e. whether it includes a claim or not. We conduct a detailed feature analysis and present our best performing models for English and Arabic tweets. For the second problem, claim retrieval, we explore the pre-trained embeddings from a Siamese network transformer model (sentence-transformers) specifically trained for semantic textual similar-ity, and perform KD-search to retrieve verified claims with respect to a query tweet.
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    Combining Textual Features for the Detection of Hateful and Offensive Language
    (Aachen, Germany : RWTH Aachen, 2021) Hakimov, Sherzod; Ewerth, Ralph; Mehta, Parth; Mandl, Thomas; Majumder, Prasenjit; Mitra, Mandar
    The detection of offensive, hateful and profane language has become a critical challenge since many users in social networks are exposed to cyberbullying activities on a daily basis. In this paper, we present an analysis of combining different textual features for the detection of hateful or offensive posts on Twitter. We provide a detailed experimental evaluation to understand the impact of each building block in a neural network architecture. The proposed architecture is evaluated on the English Subtask 1A: Identifying Hate, offensive and profane content from the post datasets of HASOC-2021 dataset under the team name TIB-VA. We compared different variants of the contextual word embeddings combined with the character level embeddings and the encoding of collected hate terms.
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    On the Impact of Features and Classifiers for Measuring Knowledge Gain during Web Search - A Case Study
    (Aachen, Germany : RWTH Aachen, 2021) Gritz, Wolfgang; Hoppe, Anett; Ewerth, Ralph; Cong, Gao; Ramanath, Maya
    Search engines are normally not designed to support human learning intents and processes. The ÿeld of Search as Learning (SAL) aims to investigate the characteristics of a successful Web search with a learning purpose. In this paper, we analyze the impact of text complexity of Web pages on predicting knowledge gain during a search session. For this purpose, we conduct an experimental case study and investigate the in˝uence of several text-based features and classiÿers on the prediction task. We build upon data from a study of related work, where 104 participants were given the task to learn about the formation of lightning and thunder through Web search. We perform an extensive evaluation based on a state-of-the-art approach and extend it with additional features related to textual complexity of Web pages. In contrast to prior work, we perform a systematic search for optimal hyperparameters and show the possible in˝uence of feature selection strategies on the knowledge gain prediction. When using the new set of features, state-of-the-art results are noticeably improved. The results indicate that text complexity of Web pages could be an important feature resource for knowledge gain prediction.
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    On the Role of Images for Analyzing Claims in Social Media
    (Aachen, Germany : RWTH Aachen, 2021) Cheema, Gullal S.; Hakimov, Sherzod; Müller-Budack, Eric; Ewerth, Ralph
    Fake news is a severe problem in social media. In this paper, we present an empirical study on visual, textual, and multimodal models for the tasks of claim, claim check-worthiness, and conspiracy detection, all of which are related to fake news detection. Recent work suggests that images are more influential than text and often appear alongside fake text. To this end, several multimodal models have been proposed in recent years that use images along with text to detect fake news on social media sites like Twitter. However, the role of images is not well understood for claim detection, specifically using transformer-based textual and multimodal models. We investigate state-of-the-art models for images, text (Transformer-based), and multimodal information for four different datasets across two languages to understand the role of images in the task of claim and conspiracy detection.
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    TIB's visual analytics group at MediaEval '20: Detecting fake news on corona virus and 5G conspiracy
    (Aachen, Germany : RWTH Aachen, 2020) Cheema, Gullal S.; Hakimov, Sherzod; Ewerth, Ralph; Hicks, Steven
    Fake news on social media has become a hot topic of research as it negatively impacts the discourse of real news in the public. Specifi-cally, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has seen a rise of inaccurate and misleading information due to the surrounding controversies and unknown details at the beginning of the pandemic. The Fak-eNews task at MediaEval 2020 tackles this problem by creating a challenge to automatically detect tweets containing misinformation based on text and structure from Twitter follower network. In this paper, we present a simple approach that uses BERT embeddings and a shallow neural network for classifying tweets using only text, and discuss our findings and limitations of the approach in text-based misinformation detection.
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    A Feature Analysis for Multimodal News Retrieval
    (Aachen : RWTH, 2020) Tahmasebzadeh, Golsa; Hakimov, Sherzod; Müller-Budack, Eric; Ewerth, Ralph
    Content-based information retrieval is based on the information contained in documents rather than using metadata such as keywords. Most information retrieval methods are either based on text or image. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of multimodal features for cross-lingual news search in various domains: politics, health, environment, sport, and finance. To this end, we consider five feature types for image and text and compare the performance of the retrieval system using different combinations. Experimental results show that retrieval results can be improved when considering both visual and textual information. In addition, it is observed that among textual features entity overlap outperforms word embeddings, while geolocation embeddings achieve better performance among visual features in the retrieval task.
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    Analysing the requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph: use cases, quality requirements, and construction strategies
    (Berlin ; Heidelberg ; New York : Springer, 2021) Brack, Arthur; Hoppe, Anett; Stocker, Markus; Auer, Sören; Ewerth, Ralph
    Current science communication has a number of drawbacks and bottlenecks which have been subject of discussion lately: Among others, the rising number of published articles makes it nearly impossible to get a full overview of the state of the art in a certain field, or reproducibility is hampered by fixed-length, document-based publications which normally cannot cover all details of a research work. Recently, several initiatives have proposed knowledge graphs (KG) for organising scientific information as a solution to many of the current issues. The focus of these proposals is, however, usually restricted to very specific use cases. In this paper, we aim to transcend this limited perspective and present a comprehensive analysis of requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) by (a) collecting and reviewing daily core tasks of a scientist, (b) establishing their consequential requirements for a KG-based system, (c) identifying overlaps and specificities, and their coverage in current solutions. As a result, we map necessary and desirable requirements for successful KG-based science communication, derive implications, and outline possible solutions.
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    Multimodal news analytics using measures of cross-modal entity and context consistency
    (London : Springer, 2021) Müller-Budack, Eric; Theiner, Jonas; Diering, Sebastian; Idahl, Maximilian; Hakimov, Sherzod; Ewerth, Ralph
    The World Wide Web has become a popular source to gather information and news. Multimodal information, e.g., supplement text with photographs, is typically used to convey the news more effectively or to attract attention. The photographs can be decorative, depict additional details, but might also contain misleading information. The quantification of the cross-modal consistency of entity representations can assist human assessors’ evaluation of the overall multimodal message. In some cases such measures might give hints to detect fake news, which is an increasingly important topic in today’s society. In this paper, we present a multimodal approach to quantify the entity coherence between image and text in real-world news. Named entity linking is applied to extract persons, locations, and events from news texts. Several measures are suggested to calculate the cross-modal similarity of the entities in text and photograph by exploiting state-of-the-art computer vision approaches. In contrast to previous work, our system automatically acquires example data from the Web and is applicable to real-world news. Moreover, an approach that quantifies contextual image-text relations is introduced. The feasibility is demonstrated on two datasets that cover different languages, topics, and domains.
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    Understanding image-text relations and news values for multimodal news analysis
    (Lausanne : Frontiers Media, 2023) Cheema, Gullal S.; Hakimov, Sherzod; Müller-Budack, Eric; Otto, Christian; Bateman, John A.; Ewerth, Ralph
    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.
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    A Review on Recent Advances in Video-based Learning Research: Video Features, Interaction, Tools, and Technologies
    (Aachen, Germany : RWTH Aachen, 2021) Navarrete, Evelyn; Hoppe, Anett; Ewerth, Ralph; Cong, Gao; Ramanath, Maya
    Human learning shifts stronger than ever towards online settings, and especially towards video platforms. There is an abundance of tutorials and lectures covering diverse topics, from fixing a bike to particle physics. While it is advantageous that learning resources are freely available on the Web, the quality of the resources varies a lot. Given the number of available videos, users need algorithmic support in finding helpful and entertaining learning resources. In this paper, we present a review of the recent research literature (2020-2021) on video-based learning. We focus on publications that examine the characteristics of video content, analyze frequently used features and technologies, and, finally, derive conclusions on trends and possible future research directions.