Political competitions are complex settings where candidates use campaigns to promote their chances to be elected. One choice focuses on conducting a positive campaign that highlights the candidate’s achievements, leadership skills, and future programs. The alternative is to focus on a negative campaign that emphasizes the negative aspects of the competing person and is aimed at offending opponents or the opponent’s supporters. In this proposal, we concentrate on negative campaigns in Israeli elections. This work introduces an empirical case study on automatic detection of negative campaigns, using machine learning and natural language processing approaches, applied to the Hebrew-language data from Israeli municipal elections. Our contribution is multi-fold: (1) We provide TONIC—daTaset fOr Negative polItical Campaign in Hebrew—which consists of annotated posts from Facebook related to Israeli municipal elections; (2) We introduce results of a case study, that explored several research questions. RQ1: Which classifier and representation perform best for this task? We employed several traditional classifiers which are known for their good performance in IR tasks and two pre-trained models based on BERT architecture; several standard representations were employed with traditional ML models. RQ2: Does a negative campaign always contain offensive language? Can a model, trained to detect offensive language, also detect negative campaigns? We are trying to answer this question by reporting results for the transfer learning from a dataset annotated with offensive language to our dataset.

Unfortunately, offensive language in social media is a common phenomenon nowadays. It harms many people and vulnerable groups. Therefore, automated detection of offensive language is in high demand and it is a serious challenge in multilingual domains. Various machine learning approaches combined with natural language techniques have been applied for this task lately. This paper contributes to this area from several aspects: (1) it introduces a new dataset of annotated Facebook comments in Hebrew; (2) it describes a case study with multiple supervised models and text representations for a task of offensive language detection in three languages, including two Semitic (Hebrew and Arabic) languages; (3) it reports evaluation results of cross-lingual and multilingual learning for detection of offensive content in Semitic languages; and (4) it discusses the limitations of these settings.

Scientific paper summarization is always challenging in Natural Language Processing (NLP) since it is hard to collect summaries from such long and complicated text. We observe that previous works tend to extract summaries from the head of the paper, resulting in information incompleteness. In this work, we present SAPGraph to utilize paper structure for solving this problem. SAPGraph is a scientific paper extractive summarization framework based on a structure-aware heterogeneous graph, which models the document into a graph with three kinds of nodes and edges based on structure information of facets and knowledge. Additionally, we provide a large-scale dataset of COVID-19-related papers, CORD-SUM. Experiments on CORD-SUM and ArXiv datasets show that SAPGraph generates more comprehensive and valuable summaries compared to previous works.

Automatic definition extraction from texts is an important task that has numerous applications in several natural language processing fields such as summarization, analysis of scientific texts, automatic taxonomy generation, ontology generation, concept identification, and question answering. For definitions that are contained within a single sentence, this problem can be viewed as a binary classification of sentences into definitions and non-definitions. Definitions in scientific literature can be generic (Wikipedia) or more formal (mathematical articles). In this paper, we focus on automatic detection of one-sentence definitions in mathematical texts, which are difficult to separate from surrounding text. We experiment with several data representations, which include sentence syntactic structure and word embeddings, and apply deep learning methods such as convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN), in order to identify mathematical definitions. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of CNN and its combination with RNN, applied on the syntactically-enriched input representation. We also present a new dataset for definition extraction from mathematical texts. We demonstrate that the use of this dataset for training learning models improves the quality of definition extraction when these models are then used for other definition datasets. Our experiments with different domains approve that mathematical definitions require special treatment, and that using cross-domain learning is inefficient.

With the constantly growing amount of information, the need arises to automatically summarize this written information. One of the challenges in the summary is that it’s difficult to generalize. For example, summarizing a news article is very different from summarizing a financial earnings report. This paper reports an approach for summarizing financial texts, which are different from the documents from other domains at least in three parameters: length, structure, and format. Our approach considers these parameters, it is adapted to hierarchical structure of sections, document length, and special “language”. The approach builds an hierarchical summary, visualized as a tree with summaries under different discourse topics. The approach was evaluated using extrinsic and intrinsic automated evaluations, which are reported in this paper. As all participants of the Financial Narrative Summarisation (FNS 2020) shared task, we used FNS2020 dataset for evaluations.

With the constantly growing amount of information, the need arises to automatically summarize this written information. One of the challenges in the summary is that it’s difficult to generalize. For example, summarizing a news article is very different from summarizing a financial earnings report. This paper reports an approach for summarizing financial texts, which are different from the documents from other domains at least in three parameters: length, structure, and format. Our approach considers these parameters, it is adapted to hierarchical structure of sections, document length, and special “language”. The approach builds an hierarchical summary, visualized as a tree with summaries under different discourse topics. The approach was evaluated using extrinsic and intrinsic automated evaluations, which are reported in this paper. As all participants of the Financial Narrative Summarisation (FNS 2020) shared task, we used FNS2020 dataset for evaluations.

Various Seq2Seq learning models designed for machine translation were applied for abstractive summarization task recently. Despite these models provide high ROUGE scores, they are limited to generate comprehensive summaries with a high level of abstraction due to its degenerated attention distribution. We introduce Diverse Convolutional Seq2Seq Model(DivCNN Seq2Seq) using Determinantal Point Processes methods(Micro DPPs and Macro DPPs) to produce attention distribution considering both quality and diversity. Without breaking the end to end architecture, DivCNN Seq2Seq achieves a higher level of comprehensiveness compared to vanilla models and strong baselines. All the reproducible codes and datasets are available online.

Automatic headline generation is a subtask of one-line summarization with many reported applications. Evaluation of systems generating headlines is a very challenging and undeveloped area. We introduce the Headline Evaluation and Analysis System (HEvAS) that performs automatic evaluation of systems in terms of a quality of the generated headlines. HEvAS provides two types of metrics– one which measures the informativeness of a headline, and another that measures its readability. The results of evaluation can be compared to the results of baseline methods which are implemented in HEvAS. The system also performs the statistical analysis of the evaluation results and provides different visualization charts. This paper describes all evaluation metrics, baselines, analysis, and architecture, utilized by our system.

Query-based text summarization is aimed at extracting essential information that answers the query from original text. The answer is presented in a minimal, often predefined, number of words. In this paper we introduce a new unsupervised approach for query-based extractive summarization, based on the minimum description length (MDL) principle that employs Krimp compression algorithm (Vreeken et al., 2011). The key idea of our approach is to select frequent word sets related to a given query that compress document sentences better and therefore describe the document better. A summary is extracted by selecting sentences that best cover query-related frequent word sets. The approach is evaluated based on the DUC 2005 and DUC 2006 datasets which are specifically designed for query-based summarization (DUC, 2005 2006). It competes with the best results.

Event detection and analysis with respect to public opinions and sentiments in social media is a broad and well-addressed research topic. However, the characteristics and sheer volume of noisy Twitter messages make this a difficult task. This demonstration paper describes a TWItter event Summarizer and Trend detector (TWIST) system for event detection, visualization, textual description, and geo-sentiment analysis of real-life events reported in Twitter.