The discourse around conspiracy theories is currently thriving amidst the rampant misinformation in online environments. Research in this field has been focused on detecting conspiracy theories on social media, often relying on limited datasets. In this study, we present a novel methodology for constructing a Twitter dataset that encompasses accounts engaged in conspiracy-related activities throughout the year 2022. Our approach centers on data collection that is independent of specific conspiracy theories and information operations. Additionally, our dataset includes a control group comprising randomly selected users who can be fairly compared to the individuals involved in conspiracy activities. This comprehensive collection effort yielded a total of 15K accounts and 37M tweets extracted from their timelines. We conduct a comparative analysis of the two groups across three dimensions: topics, profiles, and behavioral characteristics. The results indicate that conspiracy and control users exhibit similarity in terms of their profile metadata characteristics. However, they diverge significantly in terms of behavior and activity, particularly regarding the discussed topics, the terminology used, and their stance on trending subjects. In addition, we find no significant disparity in the presence of bot users between the two groups. Finally, we develop a classifier to identify conspiracy users using features borrowed from bot, troll and linguistic literature. The results demonstrate a high accuracy level (with an F1 score of 0.94), enabling us to uncover the most discriminating features associated with conspiracy-related accounts.

Recently developed pre-trained text-and-layout models (PTLMs) have shown remarkable success in multiple information extraction tasks on visually-rich documents. However, the prevailing evaluation pipeline may not be sufficiently robust for assessing the information extraction ability of PTLMs, due to inadequate annotations within the benchmarks. Therefore, we claim the necessary standards for an ideal benchmark to evaluate the information extraction ability of PTLMs. We then introduce EC-FUNSD, an entity-centric benckmark designed for the evaluation of semantic entity recognition and entity linking on visually-rich documents. This dataset contains diverse formats of document layouts and annotations of semantic-driven entities and their relations. Moreover, this dataset disentangles the falsely coupled annotation of segment and entity that arises from the block-level annotation of FUNSD. Experiment results demonstrate that state-of-the-art PTLMs exhibit overfitting tendencies on the prevailing benchmarks, as their performance sharply decrease when the dataset bias is removed.

Improving multilingual language models capabilities in low-resource languages is generally difficult due to the scarcity of large-scale data in those languages. In this paper, we relax the reliance on texts in low-resource languages by using multilingual lexicons in pretraining to enhance multilingual capabilities. Specifically, we focus on zero-shot sentiment analysis tasks across 34 languages, including 6 high/medium-resource languages, 25 low-resource languages, and 3 code-switching datasets. We demonstrate that pretraining using multilingual lexicons, without using any sentence-level sentiment data, achieves superior zero-shot performance compared to models fine-tuned on English sentiment datasets, and large language models like GPT--3.5, BLOOMZ, and XGLM. These findings are observable for unseen low-resource languages to code-mixed scenarios involving high-resource languages.

Sentiment analysis is a crucial task in natural language processing that involves identifying and extracting subjective sentiment from text. Self-training has recently emerged as an economical and efficient technique for developing sentiment analysis models by leveraging a small amount of labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data. However, given a set of training data, how to utilize them to conduct self-training makes a significant difference in the final performance of the model. We refer to this methodology as the self-training strategy. In this paper, we present an empirical study of various self-training strategies for sentiment analysis. First, we investigate the influence of the self-training strategy and hyper-parameters on the performance of traditional small language models (SLMs) in various few-shot settings. Second, we also explore the feasibility of leveraging large language models (LLMs) to help self-training. We propose and empirically compare several self-training strategies with the intervention of LLMs. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real-world sentiment analysis datasets.

Emotion corpora are typically sampled based on keyword/hashtag search or by asking study participants to generate textual instances. In any case, these corpora are not uniform samples representing the entirety of a domain. We hypothesize that this practice of data acquisition leads to unrealistic correlations between overrepresented topics in these corpora that harm the generalizability of models. Such topic bias could lead to wrong predictions for instances like "I organized the service for my aunt's funeral." when funeral events are over-represented for instances labeled with sadness, despite the emotion of pride being more appropriate here. In this paper, we study this topic bias both from the data and the modeling perspective. We first label a set of emotion corpora automatically via topic modeling and show that emotions in fact correlate with specific topics. Further, we see that emotion classifiers are confounded by such topics. Finally, we show that the established debiasing method of adversarial correction via gradient reversal mitigates the issue. Our work points out issues with existing emotion corpora and that more representative resources are required for fair evaluation of models predicting affective concepts from text.

Recent advances in NLP have improved our ability to understand the nuanced worldviews of online communities. Existing research focused on probing ideological stances treats liberals and conservatives as separate groups. However, this fails to account for the nuanced views of the organically formed online communities and the connections between them. In this paper, we study discussions of the 2020 U.S. election on Twitter to identify complex interacting communities. Capitalizing on this interconnectedness, we introduce a novel approach that harnesses message passing when finetuning language models (LMs) to probe the nuanced ideologies of these communities. By comparing the responses generated by LMs and real-world survey results, our method shows higher alignment than existing baselines, highlighting the potential of using LMs in revealing complex ideologies within and across interconnected mixed-ideology communities.

In the rapidly evolving field of scientific research, efficiently extracting key information from the burgeoning volume of scientific papers remains a formidable challenge. This paper introduces an innovative framework designed to automate the extraction of vital data from scientific PDF documents, enabling researchers to discern future research trajectories more readily. AutoIE uniquely integrates four novel components: (1) A multi-semantic feature fusion-based approach for PDF document layout analysis; (2) Advanced functional block recognition in scientific texts; (3) A synergistic technique for extracting and correlating information on molecular sieve synthesis; (4) An online learning paradigm tailored for molecular sieve literature. Our SBERT model achieves high Marco F1 scores of 87.19 and 89.65 on CoNLL04 and ADE datasets. In addition, a practical application of AutoIE in the petrochemical molecular sieve synthesis domain demonstrates its efficacy, evidenced by an impressive 78\% accuracy rate. This research paves the way for enhanced data management and interpretation in molecular sieve synthesis. It is a valuable asset for seasoned experts and newcomers in this specialized field.

While Bangla is considered a language with limited resources, sentiment analysis has been a subject of extensive research in the literature. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of exploration into sentiment analysis specifically in the realm of noisy Bangla texts. In this paper, we introduce a dataset (NC-SentNoB) that we annotated manually to identify ten different types of noise found in a pre-existing sentiment analysis dataset comprising of around 15K noisy Bangla texts. At first, given an input noisy text, we identify the noise type, addressing this as a multi-label classification task. Then, we introduce baseline noise reduction methods to alleviate noise prior to conducting sentiment analysis. Finally, we assess the performance of fine-tuned sentiment analysis models with both noisy and noise-reduced texts to make comparisons. The experimental findings indicate that the noise reduction methods utilized are not satisfactory, highlighting the need for more suitable noise reduction methods in future research endeavors. We have made the implementation and dataset presented in this paper publicly available at https://github.com/ktoufiquee/A-Comparative-Analysis-of-Noise-Reduction-Methods-in-Sentiment-Analysis-on-Noisy-Bangla-Texts

Discovery of new materials has a documented history of propelling human progress for centuries and more. The behaviour of a material is a function of its composition, structure, and properties, which further depend on its processing and testing conditions. Recent developments in deep learning and natural language processing have enabled information extraction at scale from published literature such as peer-reviewed publications, books, and patents. However, this information is spread in multiple formats, such as tables, text, and images, and with little or no uniformity in reporting style giving rise to several machine learning challenges. Here, we discuss, quantify, and document these challenges in automated information extraction (IE) from materials science literature towards the creation of a large materials science knowledge base. Specifically, we focus on IE from text and tables and outline several challenges with examples. We hope the present work inspires researchers to address the challenges in a coherent fashion, providing a fillip to IE towards a materials knowledge base.

Driven by the abundance of biomedical publications, we introduce a sentiment analysis task to understand food-health relationship. Prior attempts to incorporate health into recipe recommendation and analysis systems have primarily focused on ingredient nutritional components or utilized basic computational models trained on curated labeled data. Enhanced models that capture the inherent relationship between food ingredients and biomedical concepts can be more beneficial for food-related research, given the wealth of information in biomedical texts. Considering the costly data labeling process, these models should effectively utilize both labeled and unlabeled data. This paper introduces Entity Relationship Sentiment Analysis (ERSA), a new task that captures the sentiment of a text based on an entity pair. ERSA extends the widely studied Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) task. Specifically, our study concentrates on the ERSA task applied to biomedical texts, focusing on (entity-entity) pairs of biomedical and food concepts. ERSA poses a significant challenge compared to traditional sentiment analysis tasks, as sentence sentiment may not align with entity relationship sentiment. Additionally, we propose CERM, a semi-supervised architecture that combines different word embeddings to enhance the encoding of the ERSA task. Experimental results showcase the model's efficiency across diverse learning scenarios.