Evidence-aware fake news detection aims to determine the veracity of a given news (i.e., claim) with external evidences. We find that existing methods lack sufficient semantic perception and are easily blinded by textual expressions. For example, they still make the same prediction after we flip the semantics of a claim, which makes them vulnerable to malicious attacks. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic training framework to improve the semantic perception of evidence-aware fake news detection. Specifically, we first introduce two kinds of data augmentation to complement the original training set with synthetic data. The semantic-flipped augmentation synthesizes claims with similar textual expressions but opposite semantics, while the semantic-invariant augmentation synthesizes claims with the same semantics but different writing styles. Moreover, we design a novel module to learn better claim representation which is more sensitive to the semantics, and further incorporate it into a multi-objective optimization paradigm. In the experiments, we also extend the original test set of benchmark datasets with the synthetic data to better evaluate the model perception of semantics. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the extended test set, while achieving competitive performance on the original one. Our source code are released at https://github.com/Xyang1998/RobustFND.

We study the robustness of machine reading comprehension (MRC) models to entity renaming—do models make more wrong predictions when the same questions are asked about an entity whose name has been changed? Such failures imply that models overly rely on entity information to answer questions, and thus may generalize poorly when facts about the world change or questions are asked about novel entities. To systematically audit this issue, we present a pipeline to automatically generate test examples at scale, by replacing entity names in the original test sample with names from a variety of sources, ranging from names in the same test set, to common names in life, to arbitrary strings. Across five datasets and three pretrained model architectures, MRC models consistently perform worse when entities are renamed, with particularly large accuracy drops on datasets constructed via distant supervision. We also find large differences between models: SpanBERT, which is pretrained with span-level masking, is more robust than RoBERTa, despite having similar accuracy on unperturbed test data. We further experiment with different masking strategies as the continual pretraining objective and find that entity-based masking can improve the robustness of MRC models.

In this paper, we ask the research question of whether all the datasets in the benchmark are necessary. We approach this by first characterizing the distinguishability of datasets when comparing different systems. Experiments on 9 datasets and 36 systems show that several existing benchmark datasets contribute little to discriminating top-scoring systems, while those less used datasets exhibit impressive discriminative power. We further, taking the text classification task as a case study, investigate the possibility of predicting dataset discrimination based on its properties (e.g., average sentence length). Our preliminary experiments promisingly show that given a sufficient number of training experimental records, a meaningful predictor can be learned to estimate dataset discrimination over unseen datasets. We released all datasets with features explored in this work on DataLab.

Despite data’s crucial role in machine learning, most existing tools and research tend to focus on systems on top of existing data rather than how to interpret and manipulate data. In this paper, we propose DataLab, a unified data-oriented platform that not only allows users to interactively analyze the characteristics of data but also provides a standardized interface so that many data processing operations can be provided within a unified interface. Additionally, in view of the ongoing surge in the proliferation of datasets, DataLab has features for dataset recommendation and global vision analysis that help researchers form a better view of the data ecosystem. So far, DataLab covers 1,300 datasets and 3,583 of its transformed version, where 313 datasets support different types of analysis (e.g., with respect to gender bias) with the help of 119M samples annotated by 318 feature functions. DataLab is under active development and will be supported going forward. We have released a web platform, web API, Python SDK, and PyPI published package, which hopefully, can meet the diverse needs of researchers.

With the rapid development of NLP research, leaderboards have emerged as one tool to track the performance of various systems on various NLP tasks. They are effective in this goal to some extent, but generally present a rather simplistic one-dimensional view of the submitted systems, communicated only through holistic accuracy numbers. In this paper, we present a new conceptualization and implementation of NLP evaluation: the ExplainaBoard, which in addition to inheriting the functionality of the standard leaderboard, also allows researchers to (i) diagnose strengths and weaknesses of a single system (e.g. what is the best-performing system bad at?) (ii) interpret relationships between multiple systems. (e.g. where does system A outperform system B? What if we combine systems A, B and C?) and (iii) examine prediction results closely (e.g. what are common errors made by multiple systems or in what contexts do particular errors occur?). So far, ExplainaBoard covers more than 400 systems, 50 datasets, 40 languages, and 12 tasks. We not only released an online platform at the website but also make our evaluation tool an API with MIT Licence at Github and PyPi that allows users to conveniently assess their models offline. We additionally release all output files from systems that we have run or collected to motivate “output-driven” research in the future.

We present an event extraction framework to detect event mentions and extract events from the document-level financial news. Up to now, methods based on supervised learning paradigm gain the highest performance in public datasets (such as ACE2005, KBP2015). These methods heavily depend on the manually labeled training data. However, in particular areas, such as financial, medical and judicial domains, there is no enough labeled data due to the high cost of data labeling process. Moreover, most of the current methods focus on extracting events from one sentence, but an event is usually expressed by multiple sentences in one document. To solve these problems, we propose a Document-level Chinese Financial Event Extraction (DCFEE) system which can automatically generate a large scaled labeled data and extract events from the whole document. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of it

Accurate prediction of user attributes from social media is valuable for both social science analysis and consumer targeting. In this paper, we propose a systematic method to leverage user online social media content for predicting offline restaurant consumption level. We utilize the social login as a bridge and construct a dataset of 8,844 users who have been linked across Dianping (similar to Yelp) and Sina Weibo. More specifically, we construct consumption level ground truth based on user self report spending. We build predictive models using both raw features and, especially, latent features, such as topic distributions and celebrities clusters. The employed methods demonstrate that online social media content has strong predictive power for offline spending. Finally, combined with qualitative feature analysis, we present the differences in words usage, topic interests and following behavior between different consumption level groups.