Media seems to have become more partisan, often providing a biased coverage of news catering to the interest of specific groups. It is therefore essential to identify credible information content that provides an objective narrative of an event. News communities such as digg, reddit, or newstrust offer recommendations, reviews, quality ratings, and further insights on journalistic works. However, there is a complex interaction between different factors in such online communities: fairness and style of reporting, language clarity and objectivity, topical perspectives (like political viewpoint), expertise and bias of community members, and more. This paper presents a model to systematically analyze the different interactions in a news community between users, news, and sources. We develop a probabilistic graphical model that leverages this joint interaction to identify 1) highly credible news articles, 2) trustworthy news sources, and 3) expert users who perform the role of "citizen journalists" in the community. Our method extends CRF models to incorporate real-valued ratings, as some communities have very fine-grained scales that cannot be easily discretized without losing information. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first full-fledged analysis of credibility, trust, and expertise in news communities.

Online reviews provide viewpoints on the strengths and shortcomings of products/services, influencing potential customers' purchasing decisions. However, the proliferation of non-credible reviews -- either fake (promoting/ demoting an item), incompetent (involving irrelevant aspects), or biased -- entails the problem of identifying credible reviews. Prior works involve classifiers harnessing rich information about items/users -- which might not be readily available in several domains -- that provide only limited interpretability as to why a review is deemed non-credible. This paper presents a novel approach to address the above issues. We utilize latent topic models leveraging review texts, item ratings, and timestamps to derive consistency features without relying on item/user histories, unavailable for "long-tail" items/users. We develop models, for computing review credibility scores to provide interpretable evidence for non-credible reviews, that are also transferable to other domains -- addressing the scarcity of labeled data. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.

Online health communities are a valuable source of information for patients and physicians. However, such user-generated resources are often plagued by inaccuracies and misinformation. In this work we propose a method for automatically establishing the credibility of user-generated medical statements and the trustworthiness of their authors by exploiting linguistic cues and distant supervision from expert sources. To this end we introduce a probabilistic graphical model that jointly learns user trustworthiness, statement credibility, and language objectivity. We apply this methodology to the task of extracting rare or unknown side-effects of medical drugs --- this being one of the problems where large scale non-expert data has the potential to complement expert medical knowledge. We show that our method can reliably extract side-effects and filter out false statements, while identifying trustworthy users that are likely to contribute valuable medical information.

As that "mention" gets pulled into the system, an AI called Natural Language Processing reads the post text and determines its "Sentiment." Sentiment is used to determine if the post is positive, neutral, or negative, (and in some advanced cases, the emotion like "anger" "sadness" or "joy"). Doing this manually for every post that comes in isn't feasible (we see tens of thousands of posts on any given week). AI does this automatically for us, and it can "learn" to improve its NLP Sentiment analysis as more posts pass through it, and as manual adjustments for errors are made. And speaking of Christian's post, he used the "#nofilter" hashtag which can be assigned a "proud" tag since its basically saying "my picture was so good, I didn't need to edit it."

As the emergence and the thriving development of social networks, a huge number of short texts are accumulated and need to be processed. Inferring latent topics of collected short texts is useful for understanding its hidden structure and predicting new contents. Unlike conventional topic models such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a biterm topic model (BTM) was recently proposed for short texts to overcome the sparseness of document-level word co-occurrences by directly modeling the generation process of word pairs. Stochastic inference algorithms based on collapsed Gibbs sampling (CGS) and collapsed variational inference have been proposed for BTM. However, they either require large computational complexity, or rely on very crude estimation. In this work, we develop a stochastic divergence minimization inference algorithm for BTM to estimate latent topics more accurately in a scalable way. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm compared with existing inference algorithms.

On average approximately 40 to 50 percent of tasks in a call center are good candidates for automation. These are tasks that a call center agent or manager can trigger – updating your address, for example. The dialog between the AI and the customer is controlled by how the AI application is programmed and closely measured with human oversight. AI does not run without tight controls in place. The analytics include sentiment analysis that tells management which AI-conducted customer interactions were positive or negative.

The process of liquidity provision in financial markets can result in prolonged exposure to illiquid instruments for market makers. In this case, where a proprietary position is not desired, pro-actively targeting the right client who is likely to be interested can be an effective means to offset this position, rather than relying on commensurate interest arising through natural demand. In this paper, we consider the inference of a client profile for the purpose of corporate bond recommendation, based on typical recorded information available to the market maker. Given a historical record of corporate bond transactions and bond meta-data, we use a topic-modelling analogy to develop a probabilistic technique for compiling a curated list of client recommendations for a particular bond that needs to be traded, ranked by probability of interest. We show that a model based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation offers promising performance to deliver relevant recommendations for sales traders.

Teaching machines to accomplish tasks by conversing naturally with humans is challenging. Currently, developing task-oriented dialogue systems requires creating multiple components and typically this involves either a large amount of handcrafting, or acquiring costly labelled datasets to solve a statistical learning problem for each component. In this work we introduce a neural network-based text-in, text-out end-to-end trainable goal-oriented dialogue system along with a new way of collecting dialogue data based on a novel pipe-lined Wizard-of-Oz framework. This approach allows us to develop dialogue systems easily and without making too many assumptions about the task at hand. The results show that the model can converse with human subjects naturally whilst helping them to accomplish tasks in a restaurant search domain.

One of the core components of modern spoken dialogue systems is the belief tracker, which estimates the user's goal at every step of the dialogue. However, most current approaches have difficulty scaling to larger, more complex dialogue domains. This is due to their dependency on either: a) Spoken Language Understanding models that require large amounts of annotated training data; or b) hand-crafted lexicons for capturing some of the linguistic variation in users' language. We propose a novel Neural Belief Tracking (NBT) framework which overcomes these problems by building on recent advances in representation learning. NBT models reason over pre-trained word vectors, learning to compose them into distributed representations of user utterances and dialogue context. Our evaluation on two datasets shows that this approach surpasses past limitations, matching the performance of state-of-the-art models which rely on hand-crafted semantic lexicons and outperforming them when such lexicons are not provided.