Yuan Rao


2021

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Unified Dual-view Cognitive Model for Interpretable Claim Verification
Lianwei Wu | Yuan Rao | Yuqian Lan | Ling Sun | Zhaoyin Qi
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent studies constructing direct interactions between the claim and each single user response (a comment or a relevant article) to capture evidence have shown remarkable success in interpretable claim verification. Owing to different single responses convey different cognition of individual users (i.e., audiences), the captured evidence belongs to the perspective of individual cognition. However, individuals’ cognition of social things is not always able to truly reflect the objective. There may be one-sided or biased semantics in their opinions on a claim. The captured evidence correspondingly contains some unobjective and biased evidence fragments, deteriorating task performance. In this paper, we propose a Dual-view model based on the views of Collective and Individual Cognition (CICD) for interpretable claim verification. From the view of the collective cognition, we not only capture the word-level semantics based on individual users, but also focus on sentence-level semantics (i.e., the overall responses) among all users and adjust the proportion between them to generate global evidence. From the view of individual cognition, we select the top-k articles with high degree of difference and interact with the claim to explore the local key evidence fragments. To weaken the bias of individual cognition-view evidence, we devise inconsistent loss to suppress the divergence between global and local evidence for strengthening the consistent shared evidence between the both. Experiments on three benchmark datasets confirm that CICD achieves state-of-the-art performance.

2020

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DTCA: Decision Tree-based Co-Attention Networks for Explainable Claim Verification
Lianwei Wu | Yuan Rao | Yongqiang Zhao | Hao Liang | Ambreen Nazir
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recently, many methods discover effective evidence from reliable sources by appropriate neural networks for explainable claim verification, which has been widely recognized. However, in these methods, the discovery process of evidence is nontransparent and unexplained. Simultaneously, the discovered evidence is aimed at the interpretability of the whole sequence of claims but insufficient to focus on the false parts of claims. In this paper, we propose a Decision Tree-based Co-Attention model (DTCA) to discover evidence for explainable claim verification. Specifically, we first construct Decision Tree-based Evidence model (DTE) to select comments with high credibility as evidence in a transparent and interpretable way. Then we design Co-attention Self-attention networks (CaSa) to make the selected evidence interact with claims, which is for 1) training DTE to determine the optimal decision thresholds and obtain more powerful evidence; and 2) utilizing the evidence to find the false parts in the claim. Experiments on two public datasets, RumourEval and PHEME, demonstrate that DTCA not only provides explanations for the results of claim verification but also achieves the state-of-the-art performance, boosting the F1-score by more than 3.11%, 2.41%, respectively.

2019

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Different Absorption from the Same Sharing: Sifted Multi-task Learning for Fake News Detection
Lianwei Wu | Yuan Rao | Haolin Jin | Ambreen Nazir | Ling Sun
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Recently, neural networks based on multi-task learning have achieved promising performance on fake news detection, which focuses on learning shared features among tasks as complementarity features to serve different tasks. However, in most of the existing approaches, the shared features are completely assigned to different tasks without selection, which may lead to some useless and even adverse features integrated into specific tasks. In this paper, we design a sifted multi-task learning method with a selected sharing layer for fake news detection. The selected sharing layer adopts gate mechanism and attention mechanism to filter and select shared feature flows between tasks. Experiments on two public and widely used competition datasets, i.e. RumourEval and PHEME, demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance and boosts the F1-score by more than 0.87%, 1.31%, respectively.