Markus Strohmaier


2022

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SensePOLAR: Word sense aware interpretability for pre-trained contextual word embeddings
Jan Engler | Sandipan Sikdar | Marlene Lutz | Markus Strohmaier
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Adding interpretability to word embeddings represents an area of active research in textrepresentation. Recent work has explored the potential of embedding words via so-called polardimensions (e.g. good vs. bad, correct vs. wrong). Examples of such recent approachesinclude SemAxis, POLAR, FrameAxis, and BiImp. Although these approaches provide interpretabledimensions for words, they have not been designed to deal with polysemy, i.e. they can not easily distinguish between different senses of words. To address this limitation, we present SensePOLAR, an extension of the original POLAR framework that enables wordsense aware interpretability for pre-trained contextual word embeddings. The resulting interpretable word embeddings achieve a level ofperformance that is comparable to original contextual word embeddings across a variety ofnatural language processing tasks including the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks. Our workremoves a fundamental limitation of existing approaches by offering users sense aware interpretationsfor contextual word embeddings.

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Interpreting Emoji with Emoji
Jens Reelfs | Timon Mohaupt | Sandipan Sikdar | Markus Strohmaier | Oliver Hohlfeld
Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media

We study the extent to which emoji can be used to add interpretability to embeddings of text and emoji. To do so, we extend the POLAR-framework that transforms word embeddings to interpretable counterparts and apply it to word-emoji embeddings trained on four years of messaging data from the Jodel social network. We devise a crowdsourced human judgement experiment to study six usecases, evaluating against words only, what role emoji can play in adding interpretability to word embeddings. That is, we use a revised POLAR approach interpreting words and emoji with words, emoji or both according to human judgement. We find statistically significant trends demonstrating that emoji can be used to interpret other emoji very well.

2021

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FANG-COVID: A New Large-Scale Benchmark Dataset for Fake News Detection in German
Justus Mattern | Yu Qiao | Elma Kerz | Daniel Wiechmann | Markus Strohmaier
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER)

As the world continues to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, it is simultaneously fighting an ‘infodemic’ – a flood of disinformation and spread of conspiracy theories leading to health threats and the division of society. To combat this infodemic, there is an urgent need for benchmark datasets that can help researchers develop and evaluate models geared towards automatic detection of disinformation. While there are increasing efforts to create adequate, open-source benchmark datasets for English, comparable resources are virtually unavailable for German, leaving research for the German language lagging significantly behind. In this paper, we introduce the new benchmark dataset FANG-COVID consisting of 28,056 real and 13,186 fake German news articles related to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as data on their propagation on Twitter. Furthermore, we propose an explainable textual- and social context-based model for fake news detection, compare its performance to “black-box” models and perform feature ablation to assess the relative importance of human-interpretable features in distinguishing fake news from authentic news.

2018

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ILCM - A Virtual Research Infrastructure for Large-Scale Qualitative Data
Andreas Niekler | Arnim Bleier | Christian Kahmann | Lisa Posch | Gregor Wiedemann | Kenan Erdogan | Gerhard Heyer | Markus Strohmaier
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)