Social media conversations frequently suffer from toxicity, creating significant issues for users, moderators, and entire communities. Events in the real world, like elections or conflicts, can initiate and escalate toxic behavior online. Our study investigates how real-world events influence the origin and spread of toxicity in online discussions across various languages and regions. We gathered Reddit data comprising 4.5 million comments from 31 thousand posts in six different languages (Dutch, English, German, Arabic, Turkish and Spanish). We target fifteen major social and political world events that occurred between 2020 and 2023. We observe significant variations in toxicity, negative sentiment, and emotion expressions across different events and language communities, showing that toxicity is a complex phenomenon in which many different factors interact and still need to be investigated. We will release the data for further research along with our code.

Understanding narratives requires reasoning about the cause-and-effect relationships between events mentioned in the text. While existing foundation models yield impressive results in many NLP tasks requiring reasoning, it is unclear whether they understand the complexity of the underlying network of causal relationships of events in narratives. In this work, we present CRAB, a new Causal Reasoning Assessment Benchmark designed to evaluate causal understanding of events in real-world narratives. CRAB contains fine-grained, contextual causality annotations for ~2.7K pairs of real-world events that describe various newsworthy event timelines (e.g., the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk). Using CRAB, we measure the performance of several large language models, demonstrating that most systems achieve poor performance on the task. Motivated by classical causal principles, we also analyze the causal structures of groups of events in CRAB, and find that models perform worse on causal reasoning when events are derived from complex causal structures compared to simple linear causal chains. We make our dataset and code available to the research community.

A new machine-learning program accurately identifies COVID-19-related conspiracy theories on social media and models how they evolved over time--a tool that could someday help public health officials combat misinformation online. "A lot of machine-learning studies related to misinformation on social media focus on identifying different kinds of conspiracy theories," said Courtney Shelley, a postdoctoral researcher in the Information Systems and Modeling Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-author of the study that was published last week in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. "Instead, we wanted to create a more cohesive understanding of how misinformation changes as it spreads. Because people tend to believe the first message they encounter, public health officials could someday monitor which conspiracy theories are gaining traction on social media and craft factual public information campaigns to preempt widespread acceptance of falsehoods." The study, titled "Thought I'd Share First," used publicly available, anonymized Twitter data to characterize four COVID-19 conspiracy theory themes and provide context for each through the first five months of the pandemic.

Synthetic data is a quickly expanding trend and emerging tool in the field of data science. What is synthetic data exactly? The short answer is that synthetic data is comprised of data that isn't based on any real-world phenomena or events, rather it's generated via a computer program. Yet why is synthetic data becoming so important for data science? How is synthetic data created?

The statistical branch of Artificial Intelligence has enamored organizations across industries, spurred an immense amount of capital dedicated to its technologies, and entranced numerous media outlets for the past couple of years. All of this attention, however, will ultimately prove unwarranted unless organizations, data scientists, and various vendors can answer one simple question: can they provide Explainable AI? Although the ability to explain the results of Machine Learning models--and produce consistent results from them--has never been easy, a number of emergent techniques have recently appeared to open the proverbial'black box' rendering these models so difficult to explain. One of the most useful involves modeling real-world events with the adaptive schema of knowledge graphs and, via Machine Learning, gleaning whether they're related and how frequently they take place together. When the knowledge graph environment becomes endowed with an additional temporal dimension that organizations can traverse forwards and backwards with dynamic visualizations, they can understand what actually triggered these events, how one affected others, and the critical aspect of causation necessary for Explainable AI.

Rather than being fearful of machines rising up against humans, one company is actively trying to merge the two, by combining human intelligence with computer algorithms to predict a whole series of real-world events. Unanimous AI is a company that uses technology that draws from a concept commonly found in nature: swarm intelligence. Rather than using algorithms to replace human intelligence, the firm tries to amplify it. "The artificial swarm intelligence really refers to the way in which we actually combine humans with technology in order to come to these amplified outsets, or amplified outcomes," David Baltaxe, chief intelligence officer at Unanimous AI, said on Tuesday. Biologists and zoologists have been studying swarm intelligence in systems of insects and animals, like fishes, birds and honeybees, for a long period of time, Baltaxe told CNBC at the Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference.

Accurate multiagent social simulation requires a computational model of how people incorporate their observations of real-world events into their beliefs about the state of their world. Current methods for creating such agent-based models typically rely on manual input that can be both burdensome and subjective. In this investigation, we instead pursue automated methods that can translate available data into the desired computational models. For this purpose, we use a corpus of real-world events in combination with longitudinal public opinion polls on a variety of opinion issues. We perform two experiments using automated methods taken from the literature. In our first experiment, we train maximum entropy classifiers to model changes in opinion scores as a function of real-world events. We measure and analyze the accuracy of our learned classifiers by comparing the opinion scores they generate against the opinion scores occurring in a held-out subset of our corpus. In our second experiment, we learn Bayesian networks to capture the same function. We then compare the dependency structures induced by the two methods to identify the event features that have the most significant effect on changes in public opinion.

This paper introduces a new type of summarization task, known as microblog summarization, which aims to synthesize content from multiple microblog posts on the same topic into a human-readable prose description of fixed length. Our approach leverages (1) a generative model which induces event structures from text and (2) a user behavior model which captures how users convey relevant content.