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Collaborating Authors

 Pantel, Patrick


Preserving Integrity in Online Social Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Online social networks provide a platform for sharing information and free expression. However, these networks are also used for malicious purposes, such as distributing misinformation and hate speech, selling illegal drugs, and coordinating sex trafficking or child exploitation. This paper surveys the state of the art in keeping online platforms and their users safe from such harm, also known as the problem of preserving integrity. This survey comes from the perspective of having to combat a broad spectrum of integrity violations at Facebook. We highlight the techniques that have been proven useful in practice and that deserve additional attention from the academic community. Instead of discussing the many individual violation types, we identify key aspects of the social-media eco-system, each of which is common to a wide variety violation types. Furthermore, each of these components represents an area for research and development, and the innovations that are found can be applied widely.


Actionable Email Intent Modeling With Reparametrized RNNs

AAAI Conferences

Emails in the workplace are often intentional calls to action for its recipients. We propose to annotate these emails for what action its recipient will take. We argue that our approach of action-based annotation is more scalable and theory-agnostic than traditional speech-act-based email intent annotation, while still carrying important semantic and pragmatic information. We show that our action-based annotation scheme achieves good inter-annotator agreement. We also show that we can leverage threaded messages from other domains, which exhibit comparable intents in their conversation, with domain adaptive RAINBOW (Recurrently AttentIve Neural Bag-Of-Words). On a collection of datasets consisting of IRC, Reddit, and email, our reparametrized RNNs outperform common multitask/multidomain approaches on several speech act related tasks. We also experiment with a minimally supervised scenario of email recipient action classification, and find the reparametrized RNNs learn a useful representation.