Runcong Zhao


2023

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PANACEA: An Automated Misinformation Detection System on COVID-19
Runcong Zhao | Miguel Arana-catania | Lixing Zhu | Elena Kochkina | Lin Gui | Arkaitz Zubiaga | Rob Procter | Maria Liakata | Yulan He
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

In this demo, we introduce a web-based misinformation detection system PANACEA on COVID-19 related claims, which has two modules, fact-checking and rumour detection. Our fact-checking module, which is supported by novel natural language inference methods with a self-attention network, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. It is also able to give automated veracity assessment and ranked supporting evidence with the stance towards the claim to be checked. In addition, PANACEA adapts the bi-directional graph convolutional networks model, which is able to detect rumours based on comment networks of related tweets, instead of relying on the knowledge base. This rumour detection module assists by warning the users in the early stages when a knowledge base may not be available.

2021

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Adversarial Learning of Poisson Factorisation Model for Gauging Brand Sentiment in User Reviews
Runcong Zhao | Lin Gui | Gabriele Pergola | Yulan He
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

In this paper, we propose the Brand-Topic Model (BTM) which aims to detect brand-associated polarity-bearing topics from product reviews. Different from existing models for sentiment-topic extraction which assume topics are grouped under discrete sentiment categories such as ‘positive’, ‘negative’ and ‘neural’, BTM is able to automatically infer real-valued brand-associated sentiment scores and generate fine-grained sentiment-topics in which we can observe continuous changes of words under a certain topic (e.g., ‘shaver’ or ‘cream’) while its associated sentiment gradually varies from negative to positive. BTM is built on the Poisson factorisation model with the incorporation of adversarial learning. It has been evaluated on a dataset constructed from Amazon reviews. Experimental results show that BTM outperforms a number of competitive baselines in brand ranking, achieving a better balance of topic coherence and unique-ness, and extracting better-separated polarity-bearing topics.