"God made man because he loves stories." Elie Wiesel's phrase, taken from an ancient Hassidic parable, couldn't be more evocative. Nor could it be more capable of underlining that stories are intrinsically associated with the human condition. They accompany man's existence from the very beginning and are – perhaps – the best that humanity has to offer. The association between man and narrative dimension has deep roots.

Disney Parks have reportedly been urged to overhaul the theme of its famous Splash Mountain ride. The park's popular log flume ride has recently been getting calls for Disney to alter its whole attraction motif. In the wake of the protests against police brutality and racial injustices and amid the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, fans and parkgoers have claimed that Disney's Splash Mountain is based on the 1946 Disney film "Song of the South" -- which has been dubbed one of the "most racist movies" for its stereotypes of black people. According to a report from CNN, the controversial live-action animated musical film has long been criticized for romanticizing the post-Civil War period in South America. "Song of the South" is set in a plantation in Georgia in the 1800s during the Reconstruction era.

Open Domain dialog system evaluation is one of the most important challenges in dialog research. Existing automatic evaluation metrics, such as BLEU are mostly reference-based. They calculate the difference between the generated response and a limited number of available references. Likert-score based self-reported user rating is widely adopted by social conversational systems, such as Amazon Alexa Prize chatbots. However, self-reported user rating suffers from bias and variance among different users. To alleviate this problem, we formulate dialog evaluation as a comparison task. We also propose an automatic evaluation model CMADE (Comparison Model for Automatic Dialog Evaluation) that automatically cleans self-reported user ratings as it trains on them. Specifically, we first use a self-supervised method to learn better dialog feature representation, and then use KNN and Shapley to remove confusing samples. Our experiments show that CMADE achieves 89.2% accuracy in the dialog comparison task.

Online hate speech is a newborn problem in our modern society which is growing at a steady rate exploiting weaknesses of the corresponding regimes that characterise several social media platforms. Therefore, this phenomenon is mainly cultivated through such comments, either during users' interaction or on posted multimedia context. Nowadays, giant companies own platforms where many millions of users log in daily. Thus, protection of their users from exposure to similar phenomena for keeping up with the corresponding law, as well as for retaining a high quality of offered services, seems mandatory. Having a robust and reliable mechanism for identifying and preventing the uploading of related material would have a huge effect on our society regarding several aspects of our daily life. On the other hand, its absence would deteriorate heavily the total user experience, while its erroneous operation might raise several ethical issues. In this work, we present a protocol for creating a more suitable dataset, regarding its both informativeness and representativeness aspects, favouring the safer capture of hate speech occurrence, without at the same time restricting its applicability to other classification problems. Moreover, we produce and publish a textual dataset with two variants: binary and multi-label, called `ETHOS', based on YouTube and Reddit comments validated through figure-eight crowdsourcing platform. Our assumption about the production of more compatible datasets is further investigated by applying various classification models and recording their behaviour over several appropriate metrics.

Logged forests cover four million square kilometres of the tropics and restoring these forests is essential if we are to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, yet monitoring recovery is challenging. Tracking the abundance of visually identifiable, early-successional species enables successional status and thereby restoration progress to be evaluated. Here we present a new pipeline, SLIC-UAV, for processing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery to map early-successional species in tropical forests. The pipeline is novel because it comprises: (a) a time-efficient approach for labelling crowns from UAV imagery; (b) machine learning of species based on spectral and textural features within individual tree crowns, and (c) automatic segmentation of orthomosaiced UAV imagery into 'superpixels', using Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC). Creating superpixels reduces the dataset's dimensionality and focuses prediction onto clusters of pixels, greatly improving accuracy. To demonstrate SLIC-UAV, support vector machines and random forests were used to predict the species of hand-labelled crowns in a restoration concession in Indonesia. Random forests were most accurate at discriminating species for whole crowns, with accuracy ranging from 79.3% when mapping five common species, to 90.5% when mapping the three most visually-distinctive species. In contrast, support vector machines proved better for labelling automatically segmented superpixels, with accuracy ranging from 74.3% to 91.7% for the same species. Models were extended to map species across 100 hectares of forest. The study demonstrates the power of SLIC-UAV for mapping characteristic early-successional tree species as an indicator of successional stage within tropical forest restoration areas. Continued effort is needed to develop easy-to-implement and low-cost technology to improve the affordability of project management.

Financial implications of written reviews provide great incentives for businesses to pay fraudsters to write or use bots to generate fraud reviews. The promising performance of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in text classification, has attracted research to use them for fraud review detection. However, the lack of trusted labeled data has limited the performance of the current solutions in detecting fraud reviews. Unsupervised and semi-supervised methods are among the most applicable methods to deal with the data scarcity problem. Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) as a semi-supervised method has demonstrated to be effective for data augmentation purposes. The state-of-the-art solution utilizes GAN to overcome the data limitation problem. However, it fails to incorporate the behavioral clues in both fraud generation and detection. Besides, the state-of-the-art approach suffers from a common limitation in the training convergence of the GAN, slowing down the training procedure. In this work, we propose a regularised GAN for fraud review detection that makes use of both review text and review rating scores. Scores are incorporated through Information Gain Maximization in to the loss function for two reasons. One is to generate near-authentic and more human like score-correlated reviews. The other is to improve the stability of the GAN. Experimental results have shown better convergence of the regulated GAN. In addition, the scores are also used in combination with word embeddings of review text as input for the discriminators for better performance. Results show that the proposed framework relatively outperformed existing state-of-the-art framework; namely FakeGAN; in terms of AP by 7%, and 5% on the Yelp and TripAdvisor datasets, respectively.

Reddit has announced its replacement for Alexis Ohanian, who stepped down from the company's board of directors last week. Ohanian said he wanted his position filled by a black candidate. That person is Michael Seibel, the CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator. Seibel was also the founder of Justin.tv, He was Y Combinator's first black partner before he became CEO, and has supported donating to causes that promote the Black Lives Matter movement.

The feature uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to cancel out the noise in the background for an enhanced video calling experience.

Debunking misinformation is an important and time-critical task as there could be adverse consequences when misinformation is not quashed promptly. However, the usual supervised approach to debunking via misinformation classification requires human-annotated data and is not suited to the fast time-frame of newly emerging events such as the COVID-19 outbreak. In this paper, we postulate that misinformation itself has higher perplexity compared to truthful statements, and propose to leverage the perplexity to debunk false claims in an unsupervised manner. First, we extract reliable evidence from scientific and news sources according to sentence similarity to the claims. Second, we prime a language model with the extracted evidence and finally evaluate the correctness of given claims based on the perplexity scores at debunking time. We construct two new COVID-19-related test sets, one is scientific, and another is political in content, and empirically verify that our system performs favorably compared to existing systems. We are releasing these datasets publicly to encourage more research in debunking misinformation on COVID-19 and other topics.

Sound modelling is the process of developing algorithms that generate sound under parametric control. There are a few distinct approaches that have been developed historically including modelling the physics of sound production and propagation, assembling signal generating and processing elements to capture acoustic features, and manipulating collections of recorded audio samples. While each of these approaches has been able to achieve high-quality synthesis and interaction for specific applications, they are all labour-intensive and each comes with its own challenges for designing arbitrary control strategies. Recent generative deep learning systems for audio synthesis are able to learn models that can traverse arbitrary spaces of sound defined by the data they train on. Furthermore, machine learning systems are providing new techniques for designing control and navigation strategies for these models. This paper is a review of developments in deep learning that are changing the practice of sound modelling.