Little attention has been paid on EArly Rumor Detection (EARD), and EARD performance was evaluated inappropriately on a few datasets where the actual early-stage information is largely missing. To reverse such situation, we construct BEARD, a new Benchmark dataset for EARD, based on claims from fact-checking websites by trying to gather as many early relevant posts as possible. We also propose HEARD, a novel model based on neural Hawkes process for EARD, which can guide a generic rumor detection model to make timely, accurate and stable predictions. Experiments show that HEARD achieves effective EARD performance on two commonly used general rumor detection datasets and our BEARD dataset.

Current end-to-end retrieval-based dialogue systems are mainly based on Recurrent Neural Networks or Transformers with attention mechanisms. Although promising results have been achieved, these models often suffer from slow inference or huge number of parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight fully convolutional architecture, called DialogConv, for response selection. DialogConv is exclusively built on top of convolution to extract matching features of context and response. Dialogues are modeled in 3D views, where DialogConv performs convolution operations on embedding view, word view and utterance view to capture richer semantic information from multiple contextual views. On the four benchmark datasets, compared with state-of-the-art baselines, DialogConv is on average about 8.5x smaller in size, and 79.39x and 10.64x faster on CPU and GPU devices, respectively. At the same time, DialogConv achieves the competitive effectiveness of response selection.

Medication recommendation is a crucial task for intelligent healthcare systems. Previous studies mainly recommend medications with electronic health records (EHRs). However, some details of interactions between doctors and patients may be ignored or omitted in EHRs, which are essential for automatic medication recommendation. Therefore, we make the first attempt to recommend medications with the conversations between doctors and patients. In this work, we construct DIALMED, the first high-quality dataset for medical dialogue-based medication recommendation task. It contains 11, 996 medical dialogues related to 16 common diseases from 3 departments and 70 corresponding common medications. Furthermore, we propose a Dialogue structure and Disease knowledge aware Network (DDN), where a QA Dialogue Graph mechanism is designed to model the dialogue structure and the knowledge graph is used to introduce external disease knowledge. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is a promising solution to recommend medications with medical dialogues. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/f-window/DialMed.

Rumors are manufactured with no respect for accuracy, but can circulate quickly and widely by “word-of-post” through social media conversations. Conversation tree encodes important information indicative of the credibility of rumor. Existing conversation-based techniques for rumor detection either just strictly follow tree edges or treat all the posts fully-connected during feature learning. In this paper, we propose a novel detection model based on tree transformer to better utilize user interactions in the dialogue where post-level self-attention plays the key role for aggregating the intra-/inter-subtree stances. Experimental results on the TWITTER and PHEME datasets show that the proposed approach consistently improves rumor detection performance.

Claim verification is generally a task of verifying the veracity of a given claim, which is critical to many downstream applications. It is cumbersome and inefficient for human fact-checkers to find consistent pieces of evidence, from which solid verdict could be inferred against the claim. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end hierarchical attention network focusing on learning to represent coherent evidence as well as their semantic relatedness with the claim. Our model consists of three main components: 1) A coherence-based attention layer embeds coherent evidence considering the claim and sentences from relevant articles; 2) An entailment-based attention layer attends on sentences that can semantically infer the claim on top of the first attention; and 3) An output layer predicts the verdict based on the embedded evidence. Experimental results on three public benchmark datasets show that our proposed model outperforms a set of state-of-the-art baselines.

Customers ask questions and customer service staffs answer their questions, which is the basic service model via multi-turn customer service (CS) dialogues on E-commerce platforms. Existing studies fail to provide comprehensive service satisfaction analysis, namely satisfaction polarity classification (e.g., well satisfied, met and unsatisfied) and sentimental utterance identification (e.g., positive, neutral and negative). In this paper, we conduct a pilot study on the task of service satisfaction analysis (SSA) based on multi-turn CS dialogues. We propose an extensible Context-Assisted Multiple Instance Learning (CAMIL) model to predict the sentiments of all the customer utterances and then aggregate those sentiments into service satisfaction polarity. After that, we propose a novel Context Clue Matching Mechanism (CCMM) to enhance the representations of all customer utterances with their matched context clues, i.e., sentiment and reasoning clues. We construct two CS dialogue datasets from a top E-commerce platform. Extensive experimental results are presented and contrasted against a few previous models to demonstrate the efficacy of our model.

Sentiment expression in microblog posts can be affected by user’s personal character, opinion bias, political stance and so on. Most of existing personalized microblog sentiment classification methods suffer from the insufficiency of discriminative tweets for personalization learning. We observed that microblog users have consistent individuality and opinion bias in different languages. Based on this observation, in this paper we propose a novel user-attention-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model with adversarial cross-lingual learning framework. The user attention mechanism is leveraged in CNN model to capture user’s language-specific individuality from the posts. Then the attention-based CNN model is incorporated into a novel adversarial cross-lingual learning framework, in which with the help of user properties as bridge between languages, we can extract the language-specific features and language-independent features to enrich the user post representation so as to alleviate the data insufficiency problem. Results on English and Chinese microblog datasets confirm that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline algorithms with large margins.

Automatic rumor detection is technically very challenging. In this work, we try to learn discriminative features from tweets content by following their non-sequential propagation structure and generate more powerful representations for identifying different type of rumors. We propose two recursive neural models based on a bottom-up and a top-down tree-structured neural networks for rumor representation learning and classification, which naturally conform to the propagation layout of tweets. Results on two public Twitter datasets demonstrate that our recursive neural models 1) achieve much better performance than state-of-the-art approaches; 2) demonstrate superior capacity on detecting rumors at very early stage.

How fake news goes viral via social media? How does its propagation pattern differ from real stories? In this paper, we attempt to address the problem of identifying rumors, i.e., fake information, out of microblog posts based on their propagation structure. We firstly model microblog posts diffusion with propagation trees, which provide valuable clues on how an original message is transmitted and developed over time. We then propose a kernel-based method called Propagation Tree Kernel, which captures high-order patterns differentiating different types of rumors by evaluating the similarities between their propagation tree structures. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed kernel-based approach can detect rumors more quickly and accurately than state-of-the-art rumor detection models.

Despite many recent papers on Arabic Named Entity Recognition (NER) in the news domain, little work has been done on microblog NER. NER on microblogs presents many complications such as informality of language, shortened named entities, brevity of expressions, and inconsistent capitalization (for cased languages). We introduce simple effective language-independent approaches for improving NER on microblogs, based on using large gazetteers, domain adaptation, and a two-pass semi-supervised method. We use Arabic as an example language to compare the relative effectiveness of the approaches and when best to use them. We also present a new dataset for the task. Results of combining the proposed approaches show an improvement of 35.3 F-measure points over a baseline system trained on news data and an improvement of 19.9 F-measure points over the same system but trained on microblog data.