Abdelrhman Saleh


2020

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Probing Neural Dialog Models for Conversational Understanding
Abdelrhman Saleh | Tovly Deutsch | Stephen Casper | Yonatan Belinkov | Stuart Shieber
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Conversational AI

The predominant approach to open-domain dialog generation relies on end-to-end training of neural models on chat datasets. However, this approach provides little insight as to what these models learn (or do not learn) about engaging in dialog. In this study, we analyze the internal representations learned by neural open-domain dialog systems and evaluate the quality of these representations for learning basic conversational skills. Our results suggest that standard open-domain dialog systems struggle with answering questions, inferring contradiction, and determining the topic of conversation, among other tasks. We also find that the dyadic, turn-taking nature of dialog is not fully leveraged by these models. By exploring these limitations, we highlight the need for additional research into architectures and training methods that can better capture high-level information about dialog.

2019

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Team QCRI-MIT at SemEval-2019 Task 4: Propaganda Analysis Meets Hyperpartisan News Detection
Abdelrhman Saleh | Ramy Baly | Alberto Barrón-Cedeño | Giovanni Da San Martino | Mitra Mohtarami | Preslav Nakov | James Glass
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

We describe our submission to SemEval-2019 Task 4 on Hyperpartisan News Detection. We rely on a variety of engineered features originally used to detect propaganda. This is based on the assumption that biased messages are propagandistic and promote a particular political cause or viewpoint. In particular, we trained a logistic regression model with features ranging from simple bag of words to vocabulary richness and text readability. Our system achieved 72.9% accuracy on the manually annotated testset, and 60.8% on the test data that was obtained with distant supervision. Additional experiments showed that significant performance gains can be achieved with better feature pre-processing.

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Multi-Task Ordinal Regression for Jointly Predicting the Trustworthiness and the Leading Political Ideology of News Media
Ramy Baly | Georgi Karadzhov | Abdelrhman Saleh | James Glass | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

In the context of fake news, bias, and propaganda, we study two important but relatively under-explored problems: (i) trustworthiness estimation (on a 3-point scale) and (ii) political ideology detection (left/right bias on a 7-point scale) of entire news outlets, as opposed to evaluating individual articles. In particular, we propose a multi-task ordinal regression framework that models the two problems jointly. This is motivated by the observation that hyper-partisanship is often linked to low trustworthiness, e.g., appealing to emotions rather than sticking to the facts, while center media tend to be generally more impartial and trustworthy. We further use several auxiliary tasks, modeling centrality, hyper-partisanship, as well as left-vs.-right bias on a coarse-grained scale. The evaluation results show sizable performance gains by the joint models over models that target the problems in isolation.