The Rohingya refugee crisis is one of the biggest humanitarian crises of modern times with more than 700,000 Rohingyas rendered homeless according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. While it has received sustained press attention globally, no comprehensive research has been performed on social media pertaining to this large evolving crisis. In this work, we construct a substantial corpus of YouTube video comments (263,482 comments from 113,250 users in 5,153 relevant videos) with an aim to analyze the possible role of AI in helping a marginalized community. Using a novel combination of multiple Active Learning strategies and a novel active sampling strategy based on nearest-neighbors in the comment-embedding space, we construct a classifier that can detect comments defending the Rohingyas among larger numbers of disparaging and neutral ones. We advocate that beyond the burgeoning field of hate speech detection, automatic detection of help speech can lend voice to the voiceless people and make the internet safer for marginalized communities.

The recent Pulwama terror attack (February 14, 2019, Pulwama, Kashmir) triggered a chain of escalating events between India and Pakistan adding another episode to their 70-year-old dispute over Kashmir. The present era of ubiquitious social media has never seen nuclear powers closer to war. In this paper, we analyze this evolving international crisis via a substantial corpus constructed using comments on YouTube videos (921,235 English comments posted by 392,460 users out of 2.04 million overall comments by 791,289 users on 2,890 videos). Our main contributions in the paper are three-fold. First, we present an observation that polyglot word-embeddings reveal precise and accurate language clusters, and subsequently construct a document language-identification technique with negligible annotation requirements. We demonstrate the viability and utility across a variety of data sets involving several low-resource languages. Second, we present an analysis on temporal trends of pro-peace and pro-war intent observing that when tensions between the two nations were at their peak, pro-peace intent in the corpus was at its highest point. Finally, in the context of heated discussions in a politically tense situation where two nations are at the brink of a full-fledged war, we argue the importance of automatic identification of user-generated web content that can diffuse hostility and address this prediction task, dubbed \emph{hope-speech detection}.

Mining insights from large volume of social media texts with minimal supervision is a highly challenging Natural Language Processing (NLP) task. While Language Models' (LMs) efficacy in several downstream tasks is well-studied, assessing their applicability in answering relational questions, tracking perception or mining deeper insights is under-explored. Few recent lines of work have scratched the surface by studying pre-trained LMs' (e.g., BERT) capability in answering relational questions through "fill-in-the-blank" cloze statements (e.g., [Dante was born in MASK]). BERT predicts the MASK-ed word with a list of words ranked by probability (in this case, BERT successfully predicts Florence with the highest probability). In this paper, we conduct a feasibility study of fine-tuned LMs with a different focus on tracking polls, tracking community perception and mining deeper insights typically obtained through costly surveys. Our main focus is on a substantial corpus of video comments extracted from YouTube videos (6,182,868 comments on 130,067 videos by 1,518,077 users) posted within 100 days prior to the 2019 Indian General Election. Using fill-in-the-blank cloze statements against a recent high-performance language modeling algorithm, BERT, we present a novel application of this family of tools that is able to (1) aggregate political sentiment (2) reveal community perception and (3) track evolving national priorities and issues of interest.

How can Artificial Intelligence help a stateless minority from online abuse? Research efforts in hate speech detection thus far have largely focused on identifying and subsequently filtering out negative content that specifically targets them. In this paper, we highlight a recent work [8] which tackles a different aspect of web-vulnerability of marginalized communities: sparsity of prominority voices championing their cause. The highlighted paper advocates that blocking hate alone may not be sufficient in these cases as the internet shapes community perception to a great extent in modern times and supportive comments to a vulnerable community serve a different purpose. Using an Active Sampling approach, the paper constructs a nuanced voice-for-the-voiceless classifier that automatically discovers comments supporting a (allegedly) persecuted minority. In the context of the Rohingya refugee crisis, one of the biggest humanitarian crises of modern times, the paper presents promising results that can substantially aid content moderation efforts in finding positive content supporting the Rohingyas.

Code mixing (or code switching) is a common phenomenon observed in social-media content generated by a linguistically diverse user-base. Studies show that in the Indian sub-continent, a substantial fraction of social media posts exhibit code switching. While the difficulties posed by code mixed documents to further downstream analyses are well-understood, lending visibility to code mixed documents under certain scenarios may have utility that has been previously overlooked. For instance, a document written in a mixture of multiple languages can be partially accessible to a wider audience; this could be particularly useful if a considerable fraction of the audience lacks fluency in one of the component languages. In this paper, we provide a systematic approach to sample code mixed documents leveraging a polyglot embedding based method that requires minimal supervision. In the context of the 2019 India-Pakistan conflict triggered by the Pulwama terror attack, we demonstrate an untapped potential of harnessing code mixing for human well-being: starting from an existing hostility diffusing hope speech classifier solely trained on English documents, code mixed documents are utilized to perform cross-lingual sampling and retrieve hope speech content written in a low-resource but widely used language - Romanized Hindi. Our proposed pipeline requires minimal supervision and holds promise in substantially reducing web moderation efforts. A further exploratory study on a new COVID-19 data set introduced in this paper demonstrates the generalizability of our cross-lingual sampling technique.

BACKGROUND: Genomics and proteomics experiments produce a large amount of data that are awaiting functional elucidation. An important step in analyzing such data is to identify functional units, which consist of proteins that play coherent roles to carry out the function. Importantly, functional coherence is not identical with functional similarity. For example, proteins in the same pathway may not share the same Gene Ontology (GO) terms, but they work in a coordinated fashion so that the aimed function can be performed. Thus, simply applying existing functional similarity measures might not be the best solution to identify functional units in omics data. RESULTS: We have designed two scores for quantifying the functional coherence by considering association of GO terms observed in two biological contexts, co-occurrences in protein annotations and co-mentions in literature in the PubMed database. The counted co-occurrences of GO terms were normalized in a similar fashion as the statistical amino acid contact potential is computed in the protein structure prediction field. We demonstrate that the developed scores can identify functionally coherent protein sets, i.e. proteins in the same pathways, co-localized proteins, and protein complexes, with statistically significant score values showing a better accuracy than existing functional similarity scores. The scores are also capable of detecting protein pairs that interact with each other. It is further shown that the functional coherence scores can accurately assign proteins to their respective pathways. CONCLUSION: We have developed two scores which quantify the functional coherence of sets of proteins. The scores reflect the actual associations of GO terms observed either in protein annotations or in literature. It has been shown that they have the ability to accurately distinguish biologically relevant groups of proteins from random ones as well as a good discriminative power for detecting interacting pairs of proteins. The scores were further successfully applied for assigning proteins to pathways.