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Social spambots, an emerging class of spammers attempting to emulate people, are difficult for both human annotators and classic bot detection techniques to reliably distinguish from genuine accounts. We examine this human emulation through studying the human characteristics (personality, gender, age, emotions) exhibited by social spambots&#39; language, hypothesizing the values for these attributes will be unhuman-like (e.g. unusually high or low). We found our hypothesis mostly disconfirmed --- individually, social bots exhibit very human-like attributes. However, a striking pattern emerged when consider the full distributions of these estimated human attributes: social bots were extremely similar and average in their expressed personality, demographics, and emotion (in contrast with traditional bots which we found to exhibit more variance and extreme values than genuine accounts). We thus consider how well social bots can be identified only using the 17 variables of these human attributes and ended up with a new state of the art in social spambot detection (e.g. F1 = .946). Further, simulating the situation of not knowing the bots \textit{a priori}, we found that even an unsupervised clustering using the same 17 attributes could yield nearly as accurate of social bot identification (F1 = 0.925).

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Characterizing Social Spambots by their Human Traits

human attributes

spambots

social media

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Social spambots, an emerging class of spammers attempting to emulate people, are difficult for both human annotators and classic bot detection techniques to reliably distinguish from genuine accounts. We examine this human emulation through studying the human characteristics (personality, gender, age, emotions) exhibited by social spambots' language, hypothesizing the values for these attributes will be unhuman-like (e.g. unusually high or low). We found our hypothesis mostly disconfirmed --- individually, social bots exhibit very human-like attributes. However, a striking pattern emerged when consider the full distributions of these estimated human attributes: social bots were extremely similar and average in their expressed personality, demographics, and emotion (in contrast with traditional bots which we found to exhibit more variance and extreme values than genuine accounts). We thus consider how well social bots can be identified only using the 17 variables of these human attributes and ended up with a new state of the art in social spambot detection (e.g. F1 = .946). Further, simulating the situation of not knowing the bots \textit{a priori}, we found that even an unsupervised clustering using the same 17 attributes could yield nearly as accurate of social bot identification (F1 = 0.925).

technical paper

Cross-lingual language tasks typically require a substantial amount of annotated data or parallel translation data. We explore whether language representations that capture relationships among languages can be learned and subsequently leveraged in cross-lingual tasks without the use of parallel data. We generate dense embeddings for 29 languages using a denoising autoencoder, and evaluate the embeddings using the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) and two extrinsic tasks in a zero-shot setting: cross-lingual dependency parsing and cross-lingual natural language inference.

Language Embeddings for Typology and Cross-lingual Transfer Learning

While it has been shown that Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is highly sensitive to noisy parallel training samples, prior work treats all types of mismatches between source and target as noise. As a result, it remains unclear how samples that are mostly equivalent but contain a small number of semantically divergent tokens impact NMT training. To close this gap, we analyze the impact of different types of fine-grained semantic divergences on Transformer models. We show that models trained on synthetic divergences output degenerated text more frequently and are less confident in their predictions. Based on these findings, we introduce a divergent-aware NMT framework that uses factors to help NMT recover from the degradation caused by naturally occurring divergences, improving both translation quality and model calibration on EN-FR tasks.

Beyond Noise: Mitigating the Impact of Fine-grained Semantic Divergences on Neural Machine Translation

In this paper, we evaluate the translation of negation both automatically and manually, in English—German (EN—DE) and English—Chinese (EN—ZH). We show that the ability of neural machine translation (NMT) models to translate negation has improved with deeper and more advanced networks, although the performance varies between language pairs and translation directions. The accuracy of manual evaluation in EN—DE, DE—EN, EN—ZH, and ZH—EN is 95.7%, 94.8%, 93.4%, and 91.7%, respectively. In addition, we show that under-translation is the most significant error type in NMT, which contrasts with the more diverse error profile previously observed for statistical machine translation. To better understand the root of the under-translation of negation, we study the model's information flow and training data. While our information flow analysis does not reveal any deficiencies that could be used to detect or fix the under-translation of negation, we find that negation is often rephrased during training, which could make it more difficult for the model to learn a reliable link between source and target negation. We finally conduct intrinsic analysis and extrinsic probing tasks on negation, showing that NMT models can distinguish negation and non-negation tokens very well and encode a lot of information about negation in hidden states but nevertheless leave room for improvement.

Revisiting Negation in Neural Machine Translation

In this paper, we aim to improve abstractive dialogue summarization quality and, at the same time, enable granularity control. Our model has two primary components and stages: 1) a two-stage generation strategy that generates a preliminary summary sketch serving as the basis for the final summary. This summary sketch provides a weakly supervised signal in the form of pseudo-labeled interrogative pronoun categories and key phrases extracted using a constituency parser. 2) A simple strategy to control the granularity of the final summary, in that our model can automatically determine or control the number of generated summary sentences for a given dialogue by predicting and highlighting different text spans from the source text. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the largest dialogue summarization corpus SAMSum, with as high as 50.79 in ROUGE-L score. In addition, we conduct a case study and show competitive human evaluation results and controllability to human-annotated summaries.

Controllable Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Sketch Supervision

Much of modern-day text simplification research focuses on sentence-level simplification, transforming original, more complex sentences into simplified versions. However, adding content can often be useful when difficult concepts and reasoning need to be explained. In this work, we present the first data-driven study of content addition in text simplification, which we call elaborative simplification. We introduce a new annotated dataset of 1.3K instances of elaborative simplification in the Newsela corpus, and analyze how entities, ideas, and concepts are elaborated through the lens of contextual specificity. We establish baselines for elaboration generation using large-scale pre-trained language models, and demonstrate that considering contextual specificity during generation can improve performance. Our results illustrate the complexities of elaborative simplification, suggesting many interesting directions for future work.

Elaborative Simplification: Content Addition and Explanation Generation in Text Simplification

Defeasible reasoning is a mode of reasoning where conclusions can be overturned by taking into account new evidence. A commonly used method in cognitive science and logic literature is to handcraft argumentation supporting inference graphs. While humans find inference graphs very useful for reasoning, constructing them at scale is difficult. In this paper, we automatically generate such inference graphs through transfer learning from a related NLP task that shares the kind of reasoning that inference graphs support. Through automated metrics and human evaluation, we find that our method generates meaningful graphs for the defeasible inference task. Human accuracy on this task improves by 20% by consulting the generated graphs.
Our findings open up exciting new research avenues for cases where machine reasoning can help human reasoning.

Could you give me a hint ? Generating inference graphs for defeasible reasoning

We present our approaches for event detection in articles and sentences based on simple densely connected neural networks, as well as a solution for event sentence co-reference resolution, as part of task 1 of the Shared Task on Socio-Political and Crisis Events Detection CASE @ ACL-IJCNLP 2021. The first task is split up into four different subtasks, we participated in three of them.

FKIE_itf_2021 at CASE 2021 Task 1: Using Small Densely Fully Connected Neural Nets for Event Detection and Clustering

Automatic socio-political and crisis event detection has been a challenge for natural language processing as well as social and political science communities, due to the diversity and nuance in such events and high accuracy requirements. In this paper, we propose an approach which can handle both document and cross-sentence level event detection in a multilingual setting using pretrained transformer models. Our approach became the winning solution in document level predictions and secured the 3rd place in cross-sentence level predictions for the English language. We could also achieve competitive results for other languages to prove the effectiveness and universality of our approach.

DAAI at CASE 2021 Task 1: Transformer-based Multilingual Socio-political and Crisis Event Detection

Supervised models can achieve very high accuracy for fine-grained text classification. In practice, however, training data may be abundant for some types but scarce or even non-existent for others. We propose a hybrid architecture that uses as much labeled data as available for fine-tuning classification models, while also allowing for types with little (few-shot) or no (zero-shot) labeled data. In particular, we pair a supervised text classification model with a Natural Language Inference (NLI) reranking model. The NLI reranker uses a textual representation of target types that allows it to score the strength with which a type is implied by a text, without requiring training data for the types. Experiments show that the NLI model is very sensitive to the choice of textual representation, but can be effective for classifying unseen types. It can also improve classification accuracy for the known types of an already highly accurate supervised model.

IBM MNLP IE at CASE 2021 Task 2: NLI Reranking for Zero-Shot Text Classification

In this poster/presentation, we present the event detection models and systems we have developed for Multilingual Protest News Detection - SharedTask 1 at CASE 2021. The shared task has 4 subtasks which cover event detection at different granularity levels (from document level to token level) and across multiple languages (English, Hindi, Portuguese and Spanish). To handle data from multiple languages, we use a multilingual transformer-based language model (XLM-R) as the input text encoder. We apply a variety of techniques and build several transformer-based models that perform consistently well across all the sub-tasks and languages. Our systems achieve anaverage F1 score of 81.2. Out of thirteen subtask-language tracks, our submissions rank 1st in nine and 2nd in four tracks.

Characterizing Social Spambots by their Human Traits

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Characterizing Social Spambots by their Human Traits

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Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2021

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COVID-19 and Misinformation: A Large-Scale Lexical Analysis on Twitter

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