Abstract

The task of fact-checking has been formalised as the assessment of the truthfulness of a claim. Be it a political proclamation or a technological development, verification of a new tidbit of information before its propagation to the general public is of utmost importance. Failing to do so leads to the spread of misinformation, which is a devious tool. Fact-checking is commonly performed by journalists, manually looking up information pertaining to the statement in question. This is a drawn out and tedious process with a chance of the concerned person not covering the domain exhaustively. Some of this effort is reduced by the use of knowledge bases created over a period of time. In this work under Task 2 (Factuality) of the CLEF 2018 CheckThat! Lab, we detail a neural network based methodology which models the textual data of a claim based on various representations of its words and characters. An affixed attention mechanism allows us to encapsulate linguistic feature common in false claims. We achieve an accuracy of 39.57% on the task dataset.

Abstract

An effective news recommendation system should harness the historical information of the user based on her interactions as well as the content of the articles. In this paper we propose a novel deep learning model for news recommendation which utilizes the content of the news articles as well as the sequence in which the articles were read by the user. To model both of these information, which are essentially of different types, we propose a simple yet effective architecture which utilizes a 3-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network which takes the word embeddings of the articles present in the user history as its input. Using such a method endows the model with the capability to automatically learn spatial (features of a particular article) as well as temporal features (features across articles read by a user) which signify the interest of the user. At test time, we use this in combination with a 2-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network for recommending articles to users. On a real-world dataset our method outperformed strong baselines which also model the news recommendation problem using neural networks.

Abstract

Popular methods for news recommendation which are based on collaborative filtering and content-based filtering have multiple drawbacks. The former method does not account for the sequential nature of news reading and suffers from the problem of cold-start, while the latter, suffers from over-specialization. In order to address these issues for news recommendation we propose a Hybrid Recurrent Attention Machine (HRAM). HRAM consists of two components. The first component utilizes a neural network for matrix factorization. While in the second component, we first learn the distributed representation of each news article. We then use the historical data of the user in a sequential manner and feed it to an attention-based recurrent layer. Finally, we concatenate the outputs from both these components and use further hidden layers in order to make predictions. In this way, we harness the information present in the user reading history and boost it with the information available through collaborative filtering for providing better news recommendations. Extensive experiments over two real-world datasets show that the proposed model provides significant improvement over the state-of-the-art.

Abstract

We present an online interactive tool1 that generates titles of blog titles and thus take the first step toward automating science journalism. Science journalism aims to transform jargon-laden scientific articles into a form that the common reader can comprehend while ensuring that the underlying meaning of the article is retained. In this work, we present a tool, which, given the title and abstract of a research paper will generate a blog title by mimicking a human science journalist. The tool makes use of a model trained on a corpus of 87, 328 pairs of research papers and their corresponding blogs, built from two science news aggregators. The architecture of the model is a two stage mechanism which generates blog titles. Evaluation using standard metrics indicate the viability of the proposed system.

Abstract

Word problem solving has always been a challenging task as it involves reasoning across sentences, identification of operations and their order of application on relevant operands. Most of the earlier systems attempted to solve word problems with tailored features for handling each category of problems. In this paper, we present a new approach to solve simple arithmetic problems. Through this work we introduce a novel method where we first learn a dense representation of the problem description conditioned on the question in hand. We leverage this representation to generate the operands and operators in the appropriate order. Our approach improves upon the state-of-the-art system by 3% in one benchmark dataset while ensuring comparable accuracies in other datasets.

Abstract

An important aspect of understanding narrative text is identification of actors, its mentions and coreferences among them. Coreference Resolution in Hindi is a relatively under-explored area. In this paper, we focus on the task of resolving coreferences of actor mentions in Hindi narrative text. We propose a linguistically grounded approach for the task using Markov Logic Networks (MLN). Our approach outperforms two strong baselines on a publicly available dataset and 4 other manually created datasets.

Abstract

This paper analyzes, compares and looks at tradeoffs in different load distribution schemes for consistent hashing in DHTs(distributed hash tables). Different traffic patterns, including an adversarial pattern, were constructed to test the load distribution. A simulator was made for each load distribution scheme and the load on each node was recorded for each traffic pattern. It was shown that increasing the number of consistent hash rings doesn't change the load distribution characteristics of the DHT in simple traffic scenarios, but in the case of adversarial traffic, increasing the number of hash rings leads to an improvement of around 15% in the load distribution statistics

Abstract

Automatic categorization of computer science research papers using just the abstracts, is a hard problem to solve. This is due to the short text length of the abstracts. Also, abstracts are a general discussion of the topic with few domain specific terms. These reasons make it hard to generate good representations of abstracts which in turn leads to poor categorization performance. To address this challenge, external Knowledge Bases (KB) like Wikipedia, Freebase etc. can be used to enrich the representations for abstracts, which can aid in the categorization task. In this work, we propose a novel method for enhancing classification performance of research papers into ACM computer science categories using knowledge extracted from related Wikipedia articles and Freebase entities. We use state-of-the-art representation learning methods for feature representation of documents, followed by learning to rank method for classification. Given the abstracts of research papers from the Citation Network Dataset containing 0.24 M papers, our method of using KB, outperforms a baseline method and the stateof-the-art deep learning method in classification task by 13.25% and 5.41% respectively, in terms of accuracy. We have also open-sourced the implementation of the project4.

Abstract

We describe our submission at TAC 2017 for extracting entities and relations of interest from drug labels. We employ an end-to-end relation extraction system which jointly extracts both entities and relations. The task of end-to-end relation extraction consists of identifying boundaries of entity mentions, entity types of these mentions and appropriate semantic relation for each pair of mentions. Based on our earlier work (Pawar et al., 2017), a single neural network model (“All Word Pairs” model ie AWP-NN) is trained to assign an appropriate label to each word pair in a given sentence for performing end-to-end relation extraction. Moreover, we build an ensemble of multiple AWPNN models to achieve better performance than the individual models. We achieved 73.18% and 24.79% F-measures for entity and relation extraction, respectively.

Abstract

Developers need to comprehend a program before modifying it. In such cases,developers use cues to establish the relevance of a piece of information with a task. Beingfamiliar with different kinds of cues will help the developers to comprehend a programfaster. But unlike the experienced developers, novice developers fail to recognize therelevant cues, because (a) there are many cues and (b) they might be unfamiliar with theartifacts. However, not much is known about the developers’ choice of cue. Hence, weconducted two independent studies to understand the kind of cues used by the developersand how a tool influences their cue selection. First, from our user study on two commoncomprehension tasks, we found that developers actively seek the cues and their cue sourcechoices are similar but task dependent. In our second exploratory study, we investigatedwhether an integrated development environment (IDE) influences a developer’s cuechoices. By observing their interaction history while fixing bugs in Eclipse IDE, we foundthat the IDE’s influence on their cue choices was not statistically significant. Finally, as acase in point, we propose a novel task-specific program summarization approach to aidnovice developers in comprehending an unfamiliar program. Our approach used devel-opers cue choices to synthesize the summaries. A comparison of the synthesized sum-maries with the summaries recorded by the developers shows both had similar content.This promising result encourages us to explore task-specific cue models, which can aidnovice developers to accomplish complex comprehension tasks faster