How different cultures react and respond given a crisis is predominant in a society’s norms and political will to combat the situation. Often, the decisions made are necessitated by events, social pressure, or the need of the hour, which may not represent the nation’s will. While some are pleased with it, others might show resentment. Coronavirus (COVID-19) brought a mix of similar emotions from the nations towards the decisions taken by their respective governments. Social media was bombarded with posts containing both positive and negative sentiments on the COVID-19, pandemic, lockdown, and hashtags past couple of months. Despite geographically close, many neighboring countries reacted differently to one another. For instance, Denmark and Sweden, which share many similarities, stood poles apart on the decision taken by their respective governments. Yet, their nation’s support was mostly unanimous, unlike the South Asian neighboring countries where people showed a lot of anxiety and resentment. The purpose of this study is to analyze reaction of citizens from different cultures to the novel Coronavirus and people’s sentiment about subsequent actions taken by different countries. Deep long short-term memory (LSTM) models used for estimating the sentiment polarity and emotions from extracted tweets have been trained to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the sentiment140 dataset. The use of emoticons showed a unique and novel way of validating the supervised deep learning models on tweets extracted from Twitter.

/pdf/cross-cultural-polarity-and-emotion-detection-using-3aak2ramjk.pdf

Cross-Cultural Polarity and Emotion Detection Using Sentiment Analysis and Deep Learning on COVID-19 Related Tweets

First of all we thank the participants: 66 this year, record in terms of participants at PAN Lab since 2009! We have to thank also Martin Potthast, Matti
Wiegmann, and Nikolay Kolyada to help with the 66 Virtual Machines in the
TIRA platform. We thank Symanto for sponsoring the ex aequo award for the two best performing systems at the author profiling shared task of this year. The
work of Paolo Rosso was partially funded by the Spanish MICINN under the
research project MISMIS-FAKEnHATE on Misinformation and Miscommunication in social media: FAKE news and HATE speech (PGC2018-096212-B-C31).
The work of Anastasia Giachanou is supported by the SNSF Early Postdoc
Mobility grant under the project Early Fake News Detection on Social Media,
Switzerland (P2TIP2 181441).

Overview of the 8th Author Profiling Task at PAN 2020: Profiling Fake News Spreaders on Twitter

Cross-modal learning is essential to enable accurate fake news detection due to the fast-growing multimodal contents in online social communities. A fundamental challenge of multimodal fake news detection lies in the inherent ambiguity across different content modalities, i.e., decisions made from unimodalities may disagree with each other, which may lead to inferior multimodal fake news detection. To address this issue, we formulate the cross-modal ambiguity learning problem from an information-theoretic perspective and propose CAFE — an ambiguity-aware multimodal fake news detection method. CAFE consists of 1) a cross-modal alignment module to transform the heterogeneous unimodality features into a shared semantic space, 2) a cross-modal ambiguity learning module to estimate the ambiguity between different modalities, and 3) a cross-modal fusion module to capture the cross-modal correlations. CAFE improves fake news detection accuracy by judiciously and adaptively aggregating unimodal features and cross-modal correlations, i.e., relying on unimodal features when cross-modal ambiguity is weak and referring to cross-modal correlations when cross-modal ambiguity is strong. Experimental studies on two widely used datasets (Twitter and Weibo) demonstrate that CAFE outperforms state-of-the-art fake news detection methods by 2.2-18.9% and 1.7-11.4% on accuracy, respectively.

Cross-modal Ambiguity Learning for Multimodal Fake News Detection

How different cultures react and respond given a crisis is predominant in a society's norms and political will to combat the situation. Often the decisions made are necessitated by events, social pressure, or the need of the hour, which may not represent the will of the nation. While some are pleased with it, others might show resentment. Coronavirus (COVID-19) brought a mix of similar emotions from the nations towards the decisions taken by their respective governments. Social media was bombarded with posts containing both positive and negative sentiments on the COVID-19, pandemic, lockdown, hashtags past couple of months. Despite geographically close, many neighboring countries reacted differently to one another. For instance, Denmark and Sweden, which share many similarities, stood poles apart on the decision taken by their respective governments. Yet, their nation's support was mostly unanimous, unlike the South Asian neighboring countries where people showed a lot of anxiety and resentment. This study tends to detect and analyze sentiment polarity and emotions demonstrated during the initial phase of the pandemic and the lockdown period employing natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning techniques on Twitter posts. Deep long short-term memory (LSTM) models used for estimating the sentiment polarity and emotions from extracted tweets have been trained to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the sentiment140 dataset. The use of emoticons showed a unique and novel way of validating the supervised deep learning models on tweets extracted from Twitter.

Cross-Cultural Polarity and Emotion Detection Using Sentiment Analysis and Deep Learning - a Case Study on COVID-19.

Prior work in document summarization has mainly focused on generating short summaries of a document While this type of summary helps get a high-level view of a given document, it is desirable in some cases to know more detailed information about its salient points that can't fit in a short summary This is typically the case for longer documents such as a research paper, legal document, or a book In this paper, we present a new method for generating extended summaries of long papers Our method exploits hierarchical structure of the documents and incorporates it into an extractive summarization model through a multi-task learning approach We then present our results on three long summarization datasets, arXiv-Long, PubMed-Long, and Longsumm Our method outperforms or matches the performance of strong baselines Furthermore, we perform a comprehensive analysis over the generated results, shedding insights on future research for long-form summary generation task Our analysis shows that our multi-tasking approach can adjust extraction probability distribution to the favor of summary-worthy sentences across diverse sections Our datasets, and codes are publicly available at this https URL

/pdf/on-generating-extended-summaries-of-long-documents-3dvtvgxbq5.pdf

On Generating Extended Summaries of Long Documents.

Automatic text summarization has been widely studied as an important task in natural language processing. Traditionally, various feature engineering and machine learning based systems have been proposed for extractive as well as abstractive text summarization. Recently, deep learning based, specifically Transformer-based systems have been immensely popular. Summarization is a cognitively challenging task – extracting summary worthy sentences is laborious, and expressing semantics in brief when doing abstractive summarization is complicated. In this paper, we specifically look at the problem of summarizing scientific research papers from multiple domains. We differentiate between two types of summaries, namely, (a) LaySumm: A very short summary that captures the essence of the research paper in layman terms restricting overtly specific technical jargon and (b) LongSumm: A much longer detailed summary aimed at providing specific insights into various ideas touched upon in the paper. While leveraging latest Transformer-based models, our systems are simple, intuitive and based on how specific paper sections contribute to human summaries of the two types described above. Evaluations against gold standard summaries using ROUGE metrics prove the effectiveness of our approach. On blind test corpora, our system ranks first and third for the LongSumm and LaySumm tasks respectively.

/pdf/summaformers-laysumm-20-longsumm-20-4lw57mozh9.pdf

Summaformers @ LaySumm 20, LongSumm 20.

In this paper, we extend the task of semantic textual similarity to include sentences which contain emojis. Emojis are ubiquitous on social media today, but are often removed in the pre-processing stage of curating datasets for NLP tasks. In this paper, we qualitatively ascertain the amount of semantic information lost by discounting emojis, as well as show a mechanism of accounting for emojis in a semantic task. We create a sentence similarity dataset of 4000 pairs of tweets with emojis, which have been annotated for relatedness. The corpus contains tweets curated based on common topic as well as by replacement of emojis. The latter was done to analyze the difference in semantics associated with different emojis. We aim to provide an understanding of the information lost by removing emojis by providing a qualitative analysis of the dataset. We also aim to present a method of using both emojis and words for downstream NLP tasks beyond sentiment analysis.

Semantic Textual Similarity of Sentences with Emojis

/pdf/identifying-fake-news-spreaders-in-social-media-3s7p9cm9x7.pdf

Identifying Fake News Spreaders in Social Media.

Automatic text summarization has been widely studied as an important task in natural language processing. Traditionally, various feature engineering and machine learning based systems have been proposed for extractive as well as abstractive text summarization. Recently, deep learning based, specifically Transformer-based systems have been immensely popular. Summarization is a cognitively challenging task - extracting summary worthy sentences is laborious, and expressing semantics in brief when doing abstractive summarization is complicated. In this paper, we specifically look at the problem of summarizing scientific research papers from multiple domains. We differentiate between two types of summaries, namely, (a) LaySumm: A very short summary that captures the essence of the research paper in layman terms restricting overtly specific technical jargon and (b) LongSumm: A much longer detailed summary aimed at providing specific insights into various ideas touched upon in the paper. While leveraging latest Transformer-based models, our systems are simple, intuitive and based on how specific paper sections contribute to human summaries of the two types described above. Evaluations against gold standard summaries using ROUGE metrics prove the effectiveness of our approach. On blind test corpora, our system ranks first and third for the LongSumm and LaySumm tasks respectively.

/pdf/summaformers-laysumm-20-longsumm-20-4562bka220.pdf

Summaformers @ LaySumm 20, LongSumm 20

Social media platforms have democratized the publication process resulting into easy and viral propagation of information. However, spread of rumors via such media often results into undesired and extremely impactful political, economic, social, psychological and criminal consequences. Several manual as well as automated efforts have been undertaken in the past to solve this critical problem. Existing automated methods are text based, user credibility based or use signals from the tweet propagation tree. We aim at using the text, user, propagation tree and temporal information jointly for rumor detection on Twitter. This involves several challenges like how to handle text variations on Twitter, what signals from user profile could be useful, how to best encode the propagation tree information, and how to incorporate the temporal signal. Our novel architecture, \(T^3N\) (Text and Temporal Tree Network), leverages deep learning based architectures to encode text, user and tree information in a temporal-aware manner. Our extensive comparisons show that our proposed methods outperform the state-of-the-art techniques by \(\sim \)7 and \(\sim \)6% points respectively on two popular benchmark datasets, and also lead to better early detection results.

Nikhil Pinnaparaju

Papers

Summaformers @ LaySumm 20, LongSumm 20.

Semantic Textual Similarity of Sentences with Emojis

Identifying Fake News Spreaders in Social Media.

Summaformers @ LaySumm 20, LongSumm 20

T 3N : Harnessing Text and Temporal Tree Network for Rumor Detection on Twitter.