Influence Maximization is the task of selecting optimal nodes maximising the influence spread in social networks. This study proposes a Discretized Quantum-based Salp Swarm Algorithm (DQSSA) for optimizing influence diffusion in social networks. By discretizing meta-heuristic algorithms and infusing them with quantum-inspired enhancements, we address issues like premature convergence and low efficacy. The proposed method, guided by quantum principles, offers a promising solution for Influence Maximisation. Experiments on four real-world datasets reveal DQSSA's superior performance as compared to established cutting-edge algorithms.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identifying and classifying named entities in large-scale texts into predefined classes. NER in French and other relatively limited-resource languages cannot always benefit from approaches proposed for languages like English due to a dearth of large, robust datasets. In this paper, we present our work that aims to mitigate the effects of this dearth of large, labeled datasets. We propose a Transformer-based NER approach for French, using adversarial adaptation to similar domain or general corpora to improve feature extraction and enable better generalization. Our approach allows learning better features using large-scale unlabeled corpora from the same domain or mixed domains to introduce more variations during training and reduce overfitting. Experimental results on three labeled datasets show that our adaptation framework outperforms the corresponding non-adaptive models for various combinations of Transformer models, source datasets, and target corpora. We also show that adversarial adaptation to large-scale unlabeled corpora can help mitigate the performance dip incurred on using Transformer models pre-trained on smaller corpora.

Social networking sites, blogs, and online articles are instant sources of news for internet users globally. However, in the absence of strict regulations mandating the genuineness of every text on social media, it is probable that some of these texts are fake news or rumours. Their deceptive nature and ability to propagate instantly can have an adverse effect on society. This necessitates the need for more effective detection of fake news and rumours on the web. In this work, we annotate four fake news detection and rumour detection datasets with their emotion class labels using transfer learning. We show the correlation between the legitimacy of a text with its intrinsic emotion for fake news and rumour detection, and prove that even within the same emotion class, fake and real news are often represented differently, which can be used for improved feature extraction. Based on this, we propose a multi-task framework for fake news and rumour detection, predicting both the emotion and legitimacy of the text. We train a variety of deep learning models in single-task and multi-task settings for a more comprehensive comparison. We further analyze the performance of our multi-task approach for fake news detection in cross-domain settings to verify its efficacy for better generalization across datasets, and to verify that emotions act as a domain-independent feature. Experimental results verify that our multi-task models consistently outperform their single-task counterparts in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, both for in-domain and cross-domain settings. We also qualitatively analyze the difference in performance in single-task and multi-task learning models.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an information extraction task where specific entities are extracted from unstructured text and labelled into predefined classes. While NER models for high-resource languages like English have seen notable performance gains due to improvements in model architectures and availability of large datasets, limited-resource languages like French still face a dearth of openly available, large, labelled datasets. Recent research works use adversarial adaptation frameworks for adapting NER models from high-resource domains to low-resource domains. These approaches have been used for high-resource languages, where robust language models are available. We utilize adversarial adaptation to enable models to learn better, generalized features by adapting them to large, unlabelled corpora for better performance on source test set. We propose a Transformer-based NER approach for French using adversarial adaptation to counter the lack of large, labelled NER datasets in French. We train transformer-based NER models on labelled source datasets and use larger corpora from similar or mixed domains as target sets for improved feature learning. Our proposed approach helps outsource wider domain and general feature knowledge from easily-available large, unlabelled corpora. While we limit our evaluation to French datasets and corpora, our approach can be applied to other languages too.

Recent works on fake news detection have shown the efficacy of using emotions as a feature for improved performance. However, the cross-domain impact of emotion-guided features for fake news detection still remains an open problem. In this work, we propose an emotion-guided, domain-adaptive, multi-task approach for cross-domain fake news detection, proving the efficacy of emotion-guided models in cross-domain settings for various datasets.

Recent works on fake news detection have shown the efficacy of using emotions as a feature or emotions-based features for improved performance. However, the impact of these emotion-guided features for fake news detection in cross-domain settings, where we face the problem of domain shift, is still largely unexplored. In this work, we evaluate the impact of emotion-guided features for cross-domain fake news detection, and further propose an emotion-guided, domain-adaptive approach using adversarial learning. We prove the efficacy of emotion-guided models in cross-domain settings for various combinations of source and target datasets from FakeNewsAMT, Celeb, Politifact and Gossipcop datasets.

In recent years, social networking platforms have gained significant popularity among the masses like connecting with people and propagating ones thoughts and opinions. This has opened the door to user-specific advertisements and recommendations on these platforms, bringing along a significant focus on Influence Maximisation (IM) on social networks due to its wide applicability in target advertising, viral marketing, and personalized recommendations. The aim of IM is to identify certain nodes in the network which can help maximize the spread of certain information through a diffusion cascade. While several works have been proposed for IM, most were inefficient in exploiting community structures to their full extent. In this work, we propose a community structures-based approach, which employs a K-Shell algorithm in order to generate a score for the connections between seed nodes and communities for low-budget scenarios. Further, our approach employs entropy within communities to ensure the proper spread of information within the communities. We choose the Independent Cascade (IC) model to simulate information spread and evaluate it on four evaluation metrics. We validate our proposed approach on eight publicly available networks and find that it significantly outperforms the baseline approaches on these metrics, while still being relatively efficient.