Personality detection from text is commonly performed by analysing users' social media posts. However, existing methods heavily rely on large-scale annotated datasets, making it challenging to obtain high-quality personality labels. Moreover, most studies treat emotion and personality as independent variables, overlooking their interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised framework, EmoPerso, which improves personality detection through emotion-aware modelling. EmoPerso first leverages generative mechanisms for synthetic data augmentation and rich representation learning. It then extracts pseudo-labeled emotion features and jointly optimizes them with personality prediction via multi-task learning. A cross-attention module is employed to capture fine-grained interactions between personality traits and the inferred emotional representations. To further refine relational reasoning, EmoPerso adopts a self-taught strategy to enhance the model's reasoning capabilities iteratively. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that EmoPerso surpasses state-of-the-art models. The source code is available at https://github.com/slz0925/EmoPerso.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs), despite showing strong performance, can carry and increase biases, which can limit the development of fair NLP and IR systems. This research investigates the foundational origins of bias within PLMs, moving beyond detection to a detailed analysis of its formation and propagation across diverse architectures. Through a novel attention weight analysis, we reveal distinct attention patterns for biased versus neutral content, offering insights into the internal representations learned by PLMs. Our findings demonstrate a complex interplay between training data and model architecture, revealing that while the transformer's self-attention mechanism amplifies existing biases, the training data plays a crucial role in the initial encoding of bias within the model's representations.

In critical domains such as healthcare and law, accurately modelling the uncertainty of automatic computational models is essential. For instance, healthcare models must produce reliable estimates to guide human decision-making. However, modelling uncertainty remains challenging, particularly for models handling low-resource datasets and complex, domain-specific vocabulary. Most existing predictive models model point estimates rather than probability distributions, limiting our ability to quantify model uncertainty. This paper introduces a novel model, BAKER, designed to address these limitations. BAKER combines the strengths of Bayesian inference, known for its effectiveness in modelling uncertainty, and kernel methods, which excel at capturing complex data relationships. Incorporating kernel functions enhances model performance, particularly by reducing overfitting in data-limited scenarios. Our experimental analysis shows that BAKER significantly improves uncertainty reasoning compared to existing models.

Multimodal fake news detection often involves modelling heterogeneous data sources, such as vision and language. Existing detection methods typically rely on fusion effectiveness and cross-modal consistency to model the content, complicating understanding how each modality affects prediction accuracy. Additionally, these methods are primarily based on static feature modelling, making it difficult to adapt to the dynamic changes and relationships between different data modalities. This paper develops a significantly novel approach, GAMED, for multimodal modelling, which focuses on generating distinctive and discriminative features through modal decoupling to enhance cross-modal synergies, thereby optimizing overall performance in the detection process. GAMED leverages multiple parallel expert networks to refine features and pre-embed semantic knowledge to improve the experts' ability in information selection and viewpoint sharing. Subsequently, the feature distribution of each modality is adaptively adjusted based on the respective experts' opinions. GAMED also introduces a novel classification technique to dynamically manage contributions from different modalities, while improving the explainability of decisions. Experimental results on the Fakeddit and Yang datasets demonstrate that GAMED performs better than recently developed state-of-the-art models. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/slz0925/GAMED.

User-generated content on social media platforms provides a valuable resource for developing automated computational methods to detect mental health issues online leading to suicidal thoughts automatically. Although current fully automated methods show promise, they may produce uncertain predictions, leading to flawed conclusions. To address this, we propose a novel model called DiGrI, or Distorted Greedy Approach for Human-Assisted Online Suicide Ideation Detection, which reformulates suicide ideation assessment as a selective, prioritized prediction problem. The model incorporates a novel multi-classifier distorted greedy model that is optimized to operate under various levels of automation and abstains from making uncertain predictions with theoretical guarantees. Our results show that DiGrI outperforms strong comparative models including large language models in detecting mental health issues on a publicly available Reddit dataset. We discuss the empirical and practical implications, including the ethical considerations of using DiGrI for online automatic suicide ideation detection involving humans, if it were to be translated for use in clinical and public health practice.

Language models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) have been very effective in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) and text mining tasks including text classification. However, some tasks still pose challenges for these models, including text classification with limited labels. This can result in a cold-start problem. Although some approaches have attempted to address this problem through single-stage clustering as an intermediate training step coupled with a pre-trained language model, which generates pseudo-labels to improve classification, these methods are often error-prone due to the limitations of the clustering algorithms. To overcome this, we have developed a novel two-stage intermediate clustering with subsequent fine-tuning that models the pseudo-labels reliably, resulting in reduced prediction errors. The key novelty in our model, IDoFew, is that the two-stage clustering coupled with two different clustering algorithms helps exploit the advantages of the complementary algorithms that reduce the errors in generating reliable pseudo-labels for fine-tuning. Our approach has shown significant improvements compared to strong comparative models.

With the increasing development of human-AI teaming structures within and across geographies, the time is ripe for a continuous and objective look at the predictors, barriers, and facilitators of human-AI scientific collaboration from a multidisciplinary point of view. This paper aims at contributing to this end by exploiting a set of factors affecting attitudes towards the adoption of human-AI interaction into scientific work settings. In particular, we are interested in identifying the determinants of trust and acceptability when considering the combination of hybrid human-AI approaches for improving research practices. This includes the way as researchers assume human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) and crowdsourcing as valid mechanisms for aiding their tasks. Through the lens of a unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) combined with an extended technology acceptance model (TAM), we pursue insights on the perceived usefulness, potential blockers, and adoption drivers that may be representative of the intention to use hybrid intelligence systems as a way of unveiling unknown patterns from large amounts of data and thus enabling novel scientific discoveries.

Advertising is critical to many online e-commerce platforms such as e-Bay and Amazon. One of the important signals that these platforms rely upon is the click-through rate (CTR) prediction. The recent popularity of multi-modal sharing platforms such as TikTok has led to an increased interest in online micro-videos. It is, therefore, useful to consider micro-videos to help a merchant target micro-video advertising better and find users' favourites to enhance user experience. Existing works on CTR prediction largely exploit unimodal content to learn item representations. A relatively minimal effort has been made to leverage multi-modal information exchange among users and items. We propose a model to exploit the temporal user-item interactions to guide the representation learning with multi-modal features, and further predict the user click rate of the micro-video item. We design a Hypergraph Click-Through Rate prediction framework (HyperCTR) built upon the hyperedge notion of hypergraph neural networks, which can yield modal-specific representations of users and micro-videos to better capture user preferences. We construct a time-aware user-item bipartite network with multi-modal information and enrich the representation of each user and item with the generated interests-based user hypergraph and item hypergraph. Through extensive experiments on three public datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms various state-of-the-art methods.

Few-shot learning (FSL) is the task of learning to recognize previously unseen categories of images from a small number of training examples. This is a challenging task, as the available examples may not be enough to unambiguously determine which visual features are most characteristic of the considered categories. To alleviate this issue, we propose a method that additionally takes into account the names of the image classes. While the use of class names has already been explored in previous work, our approach differs in two key aspects. First, while previous work has aimed to directly predict visual prototypes from word embeddings, we found that better results can be obtained by treating visual and text-based prototypes separately. Second, we propose a simple strategy for learning class name embeddings using the BERT language model, which we found to substantially outperform the GloVe vectors that were used in previous work. We furthermore propose a strategy for dealing with the high dimensionality of these vectors, inspired by models for aligning cross-lingual word embeddings. We provide experiments on miniImageNet, CUB and tieredImageNet, showing that our approach consistently improves the state-of-the-art in metric-based FSL.

Twitter is currently a popular online social media platform which allows users to share their user-generated content. This publicly-generated user data is also crucial to healthcare technologies because the discovered patterns would hugely benefit them in several ways. One of the applications is in automatically discovering mental health problems, e.g., depression. Previous studies to automatically detect a depressed user on online social media have largely relied upon the user behaviour and their linguistic patterns including user's social interactions. The downside is that these models are trained on several irrelevant content which might not be crucial towards detecting a depressed user. Besides, these content have a negative impact on the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the model. To overcome the shortcomings in the existing automatic depression detection methods, we propose a novel computational framework for automatic depression detection that initially selects relevant content through a hybrid extractive and abstractive summarization strategy on the sequence of all user tweets leading to a more fine-grained and relevant content. The content then goes to our novel deep learning framework comprising of a unified learning machinery comprising of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) coupled with attention-enhanced Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) models leading to better empirical performance than existing strong baselines.

With cutting edge scientific breakthroughs, human-centred algorithmic approaches have proliferated in recent years and information technology (IT) has begun to redesign socio-technical systems in the context of human-AI collaboration. As a result, distinct forms of interaction have emerged in tandem with the proliferation of infrastructures aiding interdisciplinary work practices and research teams. Concomitantly, large volumes of heterogeneous datasets are produced and consumed at a rapid pace across many scientific domains. This results in difficulties in the reliable analysis of scientific production since current tools and algorithms are not necessarily able to provide acceptable levels of accuracy when analyzing the content and impact of publication records from large continuous scientific data streams. On the other hand, humans cannot consider all the information available and may be adversely influenced by extraneous factors. Using this rationale, we propose an initial design of a human-AI enabled pipeline for performing scientometric analyses that exploits the intersection between human behavior and machine intelligence. The contribution is a model for incorporating central principles of human-machine symbiosis (HMS) into scientometric workflows, demonstrating how hybrid intelligence systems can drive and encapsulate the future of research evaluation.

We propose a new class of methods for learning vector space embeddings of entities. While most existing methods focus on modelling similarity, our primary aim is to learn embeddings that are interpretable, in the sense that query terms have a direct geometric representation in the vector space. Intuitively, we want all entities that have some property (i.e. for which a given term is relevant) to be located in some well-defined region of the space. This is achieved by imposing max-margin constraints that are derived from a bag-of-words representation of the entities. The resulting vector spaces provide us with a natural vehicle for identifying entities that have a given property (or ranking them according to how much they have the property), and conversely, to describe what a given set of entities have in common. As we show in our experiments, our models lead to a substantially better performance in a range of entity-oriented search tasks, such as list completion and entity ranking.

Word embedding models such as Skip-gram learn a vector-space representation for each word, based on the local word collocation patterns that are observed in a text corpus. Latent topic models, on the other hand, take a more global view, looking at the word distributions across the corpus to assign a topic to each word occurrence. These two paradigms are complementary in how they represent the meaning of word occurrences. While some previous works have already looked at using word embeddings for improving the quality of latent topics, and conversely, at using latent topics for improving word embeddings, such "two-step'' methods cannot capture the mutual interaction between the two paradigms. In this paper, we propose STE, a framework which can learn word embeddings and latent topics in a unified manner. STE naturally obtains topic-specific word embeddings, and thus addresses the issue of polysemy. At the same time, it also learns the term distributions of the topics, and the topic distributions of the documents. Our experimental results demonstrate that the STE model can indeed generate useful topic-specific word embeddings and coherent latent topics in an effective and efficient way.

While most methods for learning-to-rank documents only consider relevance scores as features, better results can often be obtained by taking into account the latent topic structure of the document collection. Existing approaches that consider latent topics follow a two-stage approach, in which topics are discovered in an unsupervised way, as usual, and then used as features for the learning-to-rank task. In contrast, we propose a learning-to-rank framework which integrates the supervised learning of a maximum margin classifier with the discovery of a suitable probabilistic topic model. In this way, the labelled data that is available for the learning-to-rank task can be exploited to identify the most appropriate topics. To this end, we use a unified constrained optimization framework, which can dynamically compute the latent topic similarity score between the query and the document. Our experimental results show a consistent improvement over the state-of-the-art learning-to-rank models.

An important way to improve users’ satisfaction in Web search is to assist them by issuing more effective queries. One such approach is query reformulation, which generates new queries according to the current query issued by users. A common procedure for conducting reformulation is to generate some candidate queries first, then a scoring method is employed to assess these candidates. Currently, most of the existing methods are context based. They rely heavily on the context relation of terms in the history queries and cannot detect and maintain the semantic consistency of queries. In this article, we propose a graphical model to score queries. The proposed model exploits a latent topic space, which is automatically derived from the query log, to detect semantic dependency of terms in a query and dependency among topics. Meanwhile, the graphical model also captures the term context in the history query by skip-bigram and n-gram language models. In addition, our model can be easily extended to consider users’ history search interests when we conduct query reformulation for different users. In the task of candidate query generation, we investigate a social tagging data resource—Delicious bookmark—to generate addition and substitution patterns that are employed as supplements to the patterns generated from query log data.

We present a new unsupervised topic discovery model for a collection of text documents. In contrast to the majority of the state-of-the-art topic models, our model does not break the document's structure such as paragraphs and sentences. In addition, it preserves word order in the document. As a result, it can generate two levels of topics of different granularity, namely, segment-topics and word-topics. In addition, it can generate n-gram words in each topic. We also develop an approximate inference scheme using Gibbs sampling method. We conduct extensive experiments using publicly available data from different collections and show that our model improves the quality of several text mining tasks such as the ability to support fine grained topics with n-gram words in the correlation graph, the ability to segment a document into topically coherent sections, document classification, and document likelihood estimation.

We propose a novel framework for determining the conceptual difficulty of a domain-specific text document without using any external lexicon. Conceptual difficulty relates to finding the reading difficulty of domain-specific documents. Previous approaches to tackling domain-specific readability problem have heavily relied upon an external lexicon, which limits the scalability to other domains. Our model can be readily applied in domain-specific vertical search engines to re-rank documents according to their conceptual difficulty. We develop an unsupervised and principled approach for computing a term's conceptual difficulty in the latent space. Our approach also considers transitions between the segments generated in sequence. It performs better than the current state-of-the-art comparative methods.

Users look for information that can suit their level of expertise, but it often takes a mammoth effort to trace such information. One has to sift through multiple pages to look for one that fits the appropriate technical background. In this paper, a query-independent ranking system is proposed for technical web pages. The pages returned by the system are sorted by their relative technical difficulty in either ascending or descending order specified by the user. The technical difficulty of a document i.e. terms in sequence, is first computed by the combination of each individual term's geometry in the low-dimensional latent semantic indexing (LSI) space, which can be visualized as a conceptual terrain. Then the pages are ranked based on the expected cost to get over the terrain. Results indicate that our terrain based method outperforms traditional readability measures.