Over the last few years, content verification through reliable sources has become a fundamental need to combat disinformation. Here, we present a language-agnostic model designed to assess the reliability of sources across multiple language editions of Wikipedia. Utilizing editorial activity data, the model evaluates source reliability within different articles of varying controversiality such as Climate Change, COVID-19, History, Media, and Biology topics. Crafting features that express domain usage across articles, the model effectively predicts source reliability, achieving an F1 Macro score of approximately 0.80 for English and other high-resource languages. For mid-resource languages, we achieve 0.65 while the performance of low-resource languages varies; in all cases, the time the domain remains present in the articles (which we dub as permanence) is one of the most predictive features. We highlight the challenge of maintaining consistent model performance across languages of varying resource levels and demonstrate that adapting models from higher-resource languages can improve performance. This work contributes not only to Wikipedia's efforts in ensuring content verifiability but in ensuring reliability across diverse user-generated content in various language communities.

Morality plays a fundamental role in how we perceive information while greatly influencing our decisions and judgements. Controversial topics, including vaccination, abortion, racism, and sexuality, often elicit opinions and attitudes that are not solely based on evidence but rather reflect moral worldviews. Recent advances in natural language processing have demonstrated that moral values can be gauged in human-generated textual content. Here, we design a range of language representation models fine-tuned to capture exactly the moral nuances in text, called MoralBERT. We leverage annotated moral data from three distinct sources: Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook user-generated content covering various socially relevant topics. This approach broadens linguistic diversity and potentially enhances the models' ability to comprehend morality in various contexts. We also explore a domain adaptation technique and compare it to the standard fine-tuned BERT model, using two different frameworks for moral prediction: single-label and multi-label. We compare in-domain approaches with conventional models relying on lexicon-based techniques, as well as a Machine Learning classifier with Word2Vec representation. Our results showed that in-domain prediction models significantly outperformed traditional models. While the single-label setting reaches a higher accuracy than previously achieved for the task when using BERT pretrained models. Experiments in an out-of-domain setting, instead, suggest that further work is needed for existing domain adaptation techniques to generalise between different social media platforms, especially for the multi-label task. The investigations and outcomes from this study pave the way for further exploration, enabling a more profound comprehension of moral narratives about controversial social issues.

Geographical location is a crucial element of humanitarian response, outlining vulnerable populations, ongoing events, and available resources. Latest developments in Natural Language Processing may help in extracting vital information from the deluge of reports and documents produced by the humanitarian sector. However, the performance and biases of existing state-of-the-art information extraction tools are unknown. In this work, we develop annotated resources to fine-tune the popular Named Entity Recognition (NER) tools Spacy and roBERTa to perform geotagging of humanitarian texts. We then propose a geocoding method FeatureRank which links the candidate locations to the GeoNames database. We find that not only does the humanitarian-domain data improves the performance of the classifiers (up to F1 = 0.92), but it also alleviates some of the bias of the existing tools, which erroneously favor locations in the Western countries. Thus, we conclude that more resources from non-Western documents are necessary to ensure that off-the-shelf NER systems are suitable for the deployment in the humanitarian sector.

Personal electronic devices such as smartphones give access to a broad range of behavioral signals that can be used to learn about the characteristics and preferences of individuals. In this study we explore the connection between demographic and psychological attributes and digital records for a cohort of 7,633 people, closely representative of the US population with respect to gender, age, geographical distribution, education, and income. We collected self-reported assessments on validated psychometric questionnaires based on both the Moral Foundations and Basic Human Values theories, and combined this information with passively-collected multi-modal digital data from web browsing behavior, smartphone usage and demographic data. Then, we designed a machine learning framework to infer both the demographic and psychological attributes from the behavioral data. In a cross-validated setting, our model is found to predict demographic attributes with good accuracy (weighted AUC scores of 0.90 for gender, 0.71 for age, 0.74 for ethnicity). Our weighted AUC scores for Moral Foundation attributes (0.66) and Human Values attributes (0.60) suggest that accurate prediction of complex psychometric attributes is more challenging but feasible. This connection might prove useful for designing personalized services, communication strategies, and interventions, and can be used to sketch a portrait of people with similar worldviews.