Christopher Thomas


2021

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Joint Multimedia Event Extraction from Video and Article
Brian Chen | Xudong Lin | Christopher Thomas | Manling Li | Shoya Yoshida | Lovish Chum | Heng Ji | Shih-Fu Chang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Visual and textual modalities contribute complementary information about events described in multimedia documents. Videos contain rich dynamics and detailed unfoldings of events, while text describes more high-level and abstract concepts. However, existing event extraction methods either do not handle video or solely target video while ignoring other modalities. In contrast, we propose the first approach to jointly extract events from both video and text articles. We introduce the new task of Video MultiMedia Event Extraction and propose two novel components to build the first system towards this task. First, we propose the first self-supervised cross-modal event coreference model that can determine coreference between video events and text events without any manually annotated pairs. Second, we introduce the first cross-modal transformer architecture, which extracts structured event information from both videos and text documents. We also construct and will publicly release a new benchmark of video-article pairs, consisting of 860 video-article pairs with extensive annotations for evaluating methods on this task. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on our new benchmark dataset. We achieve 6.0% and 5.8% absolute F-score gain on multimodal event coreference resolution and multimedia event extraction.

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InfoSurgeon: Cross-Media Fine-grained Information Consistency Checking for Fake News Detection
Yi Fung | Christopher Thomas | Revanth Gangi Reddy | Sandeep Polisetty | Heng Ji | Shih-Fu Chang | Kathleen McKeown | Mohit Bansal | Avi Sil
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

To defend against machine-generated fake news, an effective mechanism is urgently needed. We contribute a novel benchmark for fake news detection at the knowledge element level, as well as a solution for this task which incorporates cross-media consistency checking to detect the fine-grained knowledge elements making news articles misinformative. Due to training data scarcity, we also formulate a novel data synthesis method by manipulating knowledge elements within the knowledge graph to generate noisy training data with specific, hard to detect, known inconsistencies. Our detection approach outperforms the state-of-the-art (up to 16.8% accuracy gain), and more critically, yields fine-grained explanations.

2015

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Samsung: Align-and-Differentiate Approach to Semantic Textual Similarity
Lushan Han | Justin Martineau | Doreen Cheng | Christopher Thomas
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015)