Twitter bot detection is vital in combating misinformation and safeguarding the integrity of social media discourse. While malicious bots are becoming more and more sophisticated and personalized, standard bot detection approaches are still agnostic to social environments (henceforth, communities) the bots operate at. In this work, we introduce community-specific bot detection, estimating the percentage of bots given the context of a community. Our method---BotPercent---is an amalgamation of Twitter bot detection datasets and feature-, text-, and graph-based models, adjusted to a particular community on Twitter. We introduce an approach that performs confidence calibration across bot detection models, which addresses generalization issues in existing community-agnostic models targeting individual bots and leads to more accurate community-level bot estimations. Experiments demonstrate that BotPercent achieves state-of-the-art performance in community-level Twitter bot detection across both balanced and imbalanced class distribution settings, presenting a less biased estimator of Twitter bot populations within the communities we analyze. We then analyze bot rates in several Twitter groups, including users who engage with partisan news media, political communities in different countries, and more. Our results reveal that the presence of Twitter bots is not homogeneous, but exhibiting a spatial-temporal distribution with considerable heterogeneity that should be taken into account for content moderation and social media policy making. The implementation of BotPercent is available at https://github.com/TamSiuhin/BotPercent.

BotPercent: Estimating Bot Populations in Twitter Communities

Audio-visual question answering (AVQA) is a challenging task that requires multistep spatio-temporal reasoning over multimodal contexts. Recent works rely on elaborate target-agnostic parsing of audio-visual scenes for spatial grounding while mistreating audio and video as separate entities for temporal grounding. This paper proposes a new target-aware joint spatio-temporal grounding network for AVQA. It consists of two key components: the target-aware spatial grounding module (TSG) and the single-stream joint audio-visual temporal grounding module (JTG). The TSG can focus on audio-visual cues relevant to the query subject by utilizing explicit semantics from the question. Unlike previous two-stream temporal grounding modules that required an additional audio-visual fusion module, JTG incorporates audio-visual fusion and question-aware temporal grounding into one module with a simpler single-stream architecture. The temporal synchronization between audio and video in the JTG is facilitated by our proposed cross-modal synchrony loss (CSL). Extensive experiments verified the effectiveness of our proposed method over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Target-Aware Spatio-Temporal Reasoning via Answering Questions in Dynamic Audio-Visual Scenarios

Public opinion is shaped by the information news media provide, and that information in turn may be shaped by the ideological preferences of media outlets. But while much attention has been devoted to media bias via overt ideological language or topic selection, a more unobtrusive way in which the media shape opinion is via the strategic inclusion or omission of $\textit{partisan events}$ that may $\textit{support}$ one side or the other. We develop a latent variable-based framework to predict the ideology of news articles by comparing multiple articles on the same story and identifying partisan events whose inclusion or omission reveals ideology. Our experiments first validate the existence of partisan event selection, and then show that article alignment and cross-document comparison detect partisan events and article ideology better than competitive baselines. 
Our results reveal the high-level form of media bias, which is present even among mainstream media with strong norms of objectivity and nonpartisanship. Our codebase and dataset are available at https://github.com/launchnlp/ATC.

All Things Considered: Detecting Partisan Events from News Media with Cross-Article Comparison

With the rise of social media, users are exposed to many misleading claims. However, the pervasive noise inherent in these posts presents a challenge in identifying precise and prominent claims that require verification. Extracting the important claims from such posts is arduous and time-consuming, yet it is an underexplored problem. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. We introduce a novel task, Claim Normalization (aka ClaimNorm), which aims to decompose complex and noisy social media posts into more straightforward and understandable forms, termed normalized claims. We propose CACN, a pioneering approach that leverages chain-of-thought and claim check-worthiness estimation, mimicking human reasoning processes, to comprehend intricate claims. Moreover, we capitalize on the in-context learning capabilities of large language models to provide guidance and to improve claim normalization. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we meticulously compile a comprehensive real-world dataset, CLAN, comprising more than 6k instances of social media posts alongside their respective normalized claims. Our experiments demonstrate that CACN outperforms several baselines across various evaluation measures. Finally, our rigorous error analysis validates CACN’s capabilities and pitfalls.

From Chaos to Clarity: Claim Normalization to Empower Fact-Checking

An attractive blog headline on social media platforms can immediately grab readers and trigger more clicks. However, a good headline shall not only contract the main content but also be eye-catchy with domain platform features, which are decided by the website’s users and objectives. With effective headlines, bloggers can obtain more site traffic and profits, while readers can have easier access to topics of interest. In this paper, we propose a disentanglement-based headline generation model: MediaHG (Social Media Headline Generation), which can balance the content and contextual features. Specifically, we first devise a sample module for various document views and generate the corresponding headline candidates. Then, we incorporate contrastive learning and auxiliary multi-task to choose the best domain-suitable headline, according to the disentangled budgets. Besides, our separated processing gains more flexible adaptation for other headline generation tasks with special domain features. Our model is built from the content and headlines of 70k hot posts collected from REDBook, a Chinese social media platform for daily sharing. Experimental results with language metrics ROUGE and human evaluation show the improvement in the headline generation task for the platform.

MediaHG: Rethinking Eye-catchy Features in Social Media Headline Generation

The increasing number of Indian language users on the internet necessitates the development of Indian language technologies. In response to this demand, our paper presents a generalized representation vector for diverse text characteristics, including native scripts, transliterated text, multilingual, code-mixed, and social media-related attributes. We gather text from both social media and well-formed sources and utilize the FastText model to create the "IndiSocialFT" embedding. Through intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation methods, we compare IndiSocialFT with three popular pretrained embeddings trained over Indian languages. Our findings show that the proposed embedding surpasses the baselines in most cases and languages, demonstrating its suitability for various NLP applications.

IndiSocialFT: Multilingual Word Representation for Indian languages in code-mixed environment

English and Chinese, known as resource-rich languages, have witnessed the strong development of transformer-based language models for natural language processing tasks. Although Vietnam has approximately 100M people speaking Vietnamese, several pre-trained models, e.g., PhoBERT, ViBERT, and vELECTRA, performed well on general Vietnamese NLP tasks, including POS tagging and named entity recognition. These pre-trained language models are still limited to Vietnamese social media tasks. In this paper, we present the first monolingual pre-trained language model for Vietnamese social media texts, ViSoBERT, which is pre-trained on a large-scale corpus of high-quality and diverse Vietnamese social media texts using XLM-R architecture. Moreover, we explored our pre-trained model on five important natural language downstream tasks on Vietnamese social media texts: emotion recognition, hate speech detection, sentiment analysis, spam reviews detection, and hate speech spans detection. Our experiments demonstrate that ViSoBERT, with far fewer parameters, surpasses the previous state-of-the-art models on multiple Vietnamese social media tasks. Our ViSoBERT model is available only for research purposes. Disclaimer: This paper contains actual comments on social networks that might be construed as abusive, offensive, or obscene.

ViSoBERT: A Pre-Trained Language Model for Vietnamese Social Media Text Processing

Despite its relevance, the maturity of NLP for social media pales in comparison with general-purpose models, metrics and benchmarks. This fragmented landscape makes it hard for the community to know, for instance, given a task, which is the best performing model and how it compares with others. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a unified benchmark for NLP evaluation in social media, SuperTweetEval, which includes a heterogeneous set of tasks and datasets combined, adapted and constructed from scratch. We benchmarked the performance of a wide range of models on SuperTweetEval and our results suggest that, despite the recent advances in language modelling, social media remains challenging.

SuperTweetEval: A Challenging, Unified and Heterogeneous Benchmark for Social Media NLP Research

Linguistic variation across a region of interest can be captured by partitioning the region into areas and using social media data to train embeddings that represent language use in those areas. Recent work has focused on larger areas, such as cities or counties, to ensure that enough social media data is available in each area, but larger areas have a limited ability to find fine-grained distinctions, such as intracity differences in language use. We demonstrate that it is possible to embed smaller areas, which can provide higher resolution analyses of language variation. We embed voting precincts, which are tiny, evenly sized political divisions for the administration of elections. The issue with modeling language use in small areas is that the data becomes incredibly sparse, with many areas having scant social media data. We propose a novel embedding approach that alternates training with smoothing, which mitigates these sparsity issues. We focus on linguistic variation across Texas as it is relatively understudied. We developed two novel quantitative evaluations that measure how well the embeddings can be used to capture linguistic variation. The first evaluation measures how well a model can map a dialect given terms specific to that dialect. The second evaluation measures how well a model can map preference of lexical variants. These evaluations show how embedding models could be used directly by sociolinguists and measure how much sociolinguistic information is contained within the embeddings. We complement this second evaluation with a methodology for using embeddings as a kind of genetic code where we identify “genes” that correspond to a sociological variable and connect those “genes” to a linguistic phenomenon thereby connecting sociological phenomena to linguistic ones. Finally, we explore approaches for inferring isoglosses using embeddings.


Capturing Fine-Grained Regional Differences in Language Use through Voting Precinct Embeddings

Interpreting answers to yes-no questions in social media is difficult. Yes and no keywords are uncommon, and the few answers that include them are rarely to be interpreted what the keywords suggest. In this paper, we present a new corpus of 4,442 yes-no question-answer pairs from Twitter. We discuss linguistic characteristics of answers whose interpretation is yes or no, as well as answers whose interpretation is unknown. We show that large language models are far from solving this problem, even after fine-tuning and blending other corpora for the same problem but outside social media.

Interpreting Answers to Yes-No Questions in User-Generated Content

Unintended dataset biases typically exist in existing Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) datasets, including label bias, where models favor the majority class due to imbalanced training data, as well as the speaker and neutral word bias, where models make unfair predictions because of excessive correlations between specific neutral words or speakers and classes. However, previous studies in ERC generally focus on capturing context-sensitive and speaker-sensitive dependencies, ignoring the unintended dataset biases of data, which hampers the generalization and fairness in ERC. To address this issue, we propose a Training-Free Debiasing framework (TFD) that operates during prediction without additional training. To ensure compatibility with various ERC models, it does not balance data or modify the model structure. Instead, TFD extracts biases from the model by generating counterfactual utterances and contexts and mitigates them using simple yet empirically robust element-wise subtraction operations. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that TFD effectively improves generalization ability and fairness across different ERC models.

A Training-Free Debiasing Framework with Counterfactual Reasoning for Conversational Emotion Detection

As the impact of social media gradually escalates, people are more likely to be exposed to indistinguishable fake news. Therefore, numerous studies have attempted to detect rumors on social media by analyzing the textual content and propagation paths. However, fewer works on rumor detection tasks consider the malicious attacks commonly observed at response level. Moreover, existing detection models have poor interpretability. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework named **D**efend-**A**nd-**S**ummarize (DAS) based on the concept that responses sharing similar opinions should exhibit similar features. Specifically, DAS filters out the attack responses and summarizes the responsive posts of each conversation thread in both extractive and abstractive ways to provide multi-perspective prediction explanations. Furthermore, we enhance our detection architecture with the transformer and Bi-directional Graph Convolutional Networks. Experiments on three public datasets, *i.e.*, RumorEval2019, Twitter15, and Twitter16, demonstrate that our DAS defends against malicious attacks and provides prediction explanations, and the proposed detection model achieves state-of-the-art.

Underline digital video library

BotPercent: Estimating Bot Populations in Twitter Communities

Target-Aware Spatio-Temporal Reasoning via Answering Questions in Dynamic Audio-Visual Scenarios

All Things Considered: Detecting Partisan Events from News Media with Cross-Article Comparison

From Chaos to Clarity: Claim Normalization to Empower Fact-Checking

MediaHG: Rethinking Eye-catchy Features in Social Media Headline Generation

IndiSocialFT: Multilingual Word Representation for Indian languages in code-mixed environment

ViSoBERT: A Pre-Trained Language Model for Vietnamese Social Media Text Processing

SuperTweetEval: A Challenging, Unified and Heterogeneous Benchmark for Social Media NLP Research

Capturing Fine-Grained Regional Differences in Language Use through Voting Precinct Embeddings

Interpreting Answers to Yes-No Questions in User-Generated Content

A Training-Free Debiasing Framework with Counterfactual Reasoning for Conversational Emotion Detection

Beyond Detection: A Defend-and-Summarize Strategy for Robust and Interpretable Rumor Analysis on Social Media | VIDEO

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