Erick Skorupa Parolin


2022

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Controllable Fake Document Infilling for Cyber Deception
Yibo Hu | Yu Lin | Erick Skorupa Parolin | Latifur Khan | Kevin Hamlen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Recent works in cyber deception study how to deter malicious intrusion by generating multiple fake versions of a critical document to impose costs on adversaries who need to identify the correct information. However, existing approaches are context-agnostic, resulting in sub-optimal and unvaried outputs. We propose a novel context-aware model, Fake Document Infilling (FDI), by converting the problem to a controllable mask-then-infill procedure. FDI masks important concepts of varied lengths in the document, then infills a realistic but fake alternative considering both the previous and future contexts. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on technical documents and news stories. Results show that FDI outperforms the baselines in generating highly believable fakes with moderate modification to protect critical information and deceive adversaries.

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ConfliBERT: A Pre-trained Language Model for Political Conflict and Violence
Yibo Hu | MohammadSaleh Hosseini | Erick Skorupa Parolin | Javier Osorio | Latifur Khan | Patrick Brandt | Vito D’Orazio
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Analyzing conflicts and political violence around the world is a persistent challenge in the political science and policy communities due in large part to the vast volumes of specialized text needed to monitor conflict and violence on a global scale. To help advance research in political science, we introduce ConfliBERT, a domain-specific pre-trained language model for conflict and political violence. We first gather a large domain-specific text corpus for language modeling from various sources. We then build ConfliBERT using two approaches: pre-training from scratch and continual pre-training. To evaluate ConfliBERT, we collect 12 datasets and implement 18 tasks to assess the models’ practical application in conflict research. Finally, we evaluate several versions of ConfliBERT in multiple experiments. Results consistently show that ConfliBERT outperforms BERT when analyzing political violence and conflict.