Recent advancements in retrieval-augmented generation have demonstrated impressive performance on the question-answering task. However, most previous work predominantly focuses on text-based answers. Although some studies have explored multimodal data, they still fall short in generating comprehensive multimodal answers, especially step-by-step tutorials for accomplishing specific goals. This capability is especially valuable in application scenarios such as enterprise chatbots, customer service systems, and educational platforms. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective framework, MuRAR (Multimodal Retrieval and Answer Refinement). MuRAR starts by generating an initial text answer based on the user’s question. It then retrieves multimodal data relevant to the snippets of the initial text answer. By leveraging the retrieved multimodal data and contextual features, MuRAR refines the initial text answer to create a more comprehensive and informative response. This highly adaptable framework can be easily integrated into an enterprise chatbot to produce multimodal answers with minimal modifications. Human evaluations demonstrate that the multimodal answers generated by MuRAR are significantly more useful and readable than plain text responses. A video demo of MuRAR is available at https://youtu.be/ykGRtyVVQpU.

Climate change poses an urgent global problem that requires efficient data analysis mechanisms to provide insights into climate-related discussions on social media platforms. This paper presents a framework aimed at understanding social media users’ perceptions of various climate change topics and uncovering the insights behind these perceptions. Our framework employs large language model to develop a taxonomy of factual claims related to climate change and build a classification model that detects the truthfulness stance of tweets toward the factual claims. The findings reveal two key conclusions: (1) The public tends to believe the claims are true, regardless of the actual claim veracity; (2) The public shows a lack of discernment between facts and misinformation across different topics, particularly in areas related to politics, economy, and environment.

In generating natural language descriptions for knowledge graph triples, prior works used either small-scale, human-annotated datasets or datasets with limited variety of graph shapes, e.g., those having mostly star graphs. Graph-to-text models trained and evaluated on such datasets are largely not assessed for more realistic large-scale, open-domain settings. We introduce a new dataset, GraphNarrative, to fill this gap. Fine-tuning transformer-based pre-trained language models has achieved state-of-the-art performance among graph-to-text models. However, this method suffers from information hallucination—the generated text may contain fabricated facts not present in input graphs. We propose a novel approach that, given a graph-sentence pair in GraphNarrative, trims the sentence to eliminate portions that are not present in the corresponding graph, by utilizing the sentence’s dependency parse tree. Our experiment results verify this approach using models trained on GraphNarrative and existing datasets. The dataset, source code, and trained models are released at https://github.com/idirlab/graphnarrator.

This paper describes the current milestones achieved in our ongoing project that aims to understand the surveillance of, impact of and intervention on COVID-19 misinfodemic on Twitter. Specifically, it introduces a public dashboard which, in addition to displaying case counts in an interactive map and a navigational panel, also provides some unique features not found in other places. Particularly, the dashboard uses a curated catalog of COVID-19 related facts and debunks of misinformation, and it displays the most prevalent information from the catalog among Twitter users in user-selected U.S. geographic regions. The paper explains how to use BERT models to match tweets with the facts and misinformation and to detect their stance towards such information. The paper also discusses the results of preliminary experiments on analyzing the spatio-temporal spread of misinformation.