Media
The State of AI Ethics Report (Volume 5)
Gupta, Abhishek, Wright, Connor, Ganapini, Marianna Bergamaschi, Sweidan, Masa, Butalid, Renjie
This report from the Montreal AI Ethics Institute covers the most salient progress in research and reporting over the second quarter of 2021 in the field of AI ethics with a special emphasis on "Environment and AI", "Creativity and AI", and "Geopolitics and AI." The report also features an exclusive piece titled "Critical Race Quantum Computer" that applies ideas from quantum physics to explain the complexities of human characteristics and how they can and should shape our interactions with each other. The report also features special contributions on the subject of pedagogy in AI ethics, sociology and AI ethics, and organizational challenges to implementing AI ethics in practice. Given MAIEI's mission to highlight scholars from around the world working on AI ethics issues, the report also features two spotlights sharing the work of scholars operating in Singapore and Mexico helping to shape policy measures as they relate to the responsible use of technology. The report also has an extensive section covering the gamut of issues when it comes to the societal impacts of AI covering areas of bias, privacy, transparency, accountability, fairness, interpretability, disinformation, policymaking, law, regulations, and moral philosophy.
Encoding Heterogeneous Social and Political Context for Entity Stance Prediction
Feng, Shangbin, Chen, Zilong, Yu, Peisheng, Luo, Minnan
Political stance detection has become an important task due to the increasingly polarized political ideologies. Most existing works focus on identifying perspectives in news articles or social media posts, while social entities, such as individuals and organizations, produce these texts and actually take stances. In this paper, we propose the novel task of entity stance prediction, which aims to predict entities' stances given their social and political context. Specifically, we retrieve facts from Wikipedia about social entities regarding contemporary U.S. politics. We then annotate social entities' stances towards political ideologies with the help of domain experts. After defining the task of entity stance prediction, we propose a graph-based solution, which constructs a heterogeneous information network from collected facts and adopts gated relational graph convolutional networks for representation learning. Our model is then trained with a combination of supervised, self-supervised and unsupervised loss functions, which are motivated by multiple social and political phenomenons. We conduct extensive experiments to compare our method with existing text and graph analysis baselines. Our model achieves highest stance detection accuracy and yields inspiring insights regarding social entity stances. We further conduct ablation study and parameter analysis to study the mechanism and effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Knowledge Graph Augmented Political Perspective Detection in News Media
Feng, Shangbin, Chen, Zilong, Li, Qingyao, Luo, Minnan
Identifying political perspective in news media has become an important task due to the rapid growth of political commentary and the increasingly polarized ideologies. Previous approaches only focus on leveraging the semantic information and leaves out the rich social and political context that helps individuals understand political stances. In this paper, we propose a perspective detection method that incorporates external knowledge of real-world politics. Specifically, we construct a contemporary political knowledge graph with 1,071 entities and 10,703 triples. We then build a heterogeneous information network for each news document that jointly models article semantics and external knowledge in knowledge graphs. Finally, we apply gated relational graph convolutional networks and conduct political perspective detection as graph-level classification. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves the best performance and outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 5.49\%. Numerous ablation studies further bear out the necessity of external knowledge and the effectiveness of our graph-based approach.