Benjamin Icard


2024

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A Multi-Label Dataset of French Fake News: Human and Machine Insights
Benjamin Icard | François Maine | Morgane Casanova | Géraud Faye | Julien Chanson | Guillaume Gadek | Ghislain Atemezing | François Bancilhon | Paul Égré
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

We present a corpus of 100 documents, named OBSINFOX, selected from 17 sources of French press considered unreliable by expert agencies, annotated using 11 labels by 8 annotators. By collecting more labels than usual, by more annotators than is typically done, we can identify features that humans consider as characteristic of fake news, and compare them to the predictions of automated classifiers. We present a topic and genre analysis using Gate Cloud, indicative of the prevalence of satire-like text in the corpus. We then use the subjectivity analyzer VAGO, and a neural version of it, to clarify the link between ascriptions of the label Subjective and ascriptions of the label Fake News. The annotated dataset is available online at the following url: https://github.com/obs-info/obsinfox Keywords: Fake News, Multi-Labels, Subjectivity, Vagueness, Detail, Opinion, Exaggeration, French Press

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Exposing propaganda: an analysis of stylistic cues comparing human annotations and machine classification
Géraud Faye | Benjamin Icard | Morgane Casanova | Julien Chanson | François Maine | François Bancilhon | Guillaume Gadek | Guillaume Gravier | Paul Égré
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language

This paper investigates the language of propaganda and its stylistic features. It presents the PPN dataset, standing for Propagandist Pseudo-News, a multisource, multilingual, multimodal dataset composed of news articles extracted from websites identified as propaganda sources by expert agencies. A limited sample from this set was randomly mixed with papers from the regular French press, and their URL masked, to conduct an annotation-experiment by humans, using 11 distinct labels. The results show that human annotators were able to reliably discriminate between the two types of press across each of the labels. We use different NLP techniques to identify the cues used by annotators, and to compare them with machine classification: first the analyzer VAGO to detect discourse vagueness and subjectivity, and then four different classifiers, two based on RoBERTa, one CATS using syntax, and one XGBoost combining syntactic and semantic features.

2023

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Un traitement hybride du vague textuel : du système expert VAGO à son clone neuronal
Benjamin Icard | Vincent Claveau | Ghislain Atemezing | Paul Egré
Actes de CORIA-TALN 2023. Actes de la 30e Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN), volume 1 : travaux de recherche originaux -- articles longs

L’outil VAGO est un système expert de détection du vague lexical qui mesure aussi le degré de subjectivité du discours, ainsi que son niveau de détail. Dans cet article, nous construisons un clone neuronal de VAGO, fondé sur une architecture de type BERT, entraîné à partir des scores du VAGO symbolique sur un corpus de presse française (FreSaDa). L’analyse qualitative et quantitative montre la fidélité de la version neuronale. En exploitant des outils d’explicabilité (LIME), nous montrons ensuite l’intérêt de cette version neuronale d’une part pour l’enrichissement des lexiques de la version symbolique, et d’autre part pour la production de versions dans d’autres langues.