Given a web page, extracting an object along with various attributes of interest (e.g. price, publisher, author, and genre for a book) can facilitate a variety of downstream applications such as large-scale knowledge base construction, e-commerce product search, and personalized recommendation. Prior approaches have either relied on computationally expensive visual feature engineering or required large amounts of training data to get to an acceptable precision. In this paper, we propose a novel method, LeArNing TransfErable node RepresentatioNs for Attribute Extraction (LANTERN), to tackle the problem. We model the problem as a tree node tagging task. The key insight is to learn a contextual representation for each node in the DOM tree where the context explicitly takes into account the tree structure of the neighborhood around the node. Experiments on the SWDE public dataset show that LANTERN outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 1.44% (F1 score) with a dramatically simpler model architecture. Furthermore, we report that utilizing data from a different domain (for instance, using training data about web pages with cars to extract book objects) is surprisingly useful and helps beat the SOTA by a further 1.37%.

The widespread of fake news and misinformation in various domains ranging from politics, economics to public health has posed an urgent need to automatically fact-check information.A recent trend in fake news detection is to utilize evidence from external sources.However, existing evidence-aware fake news detection methods focused on either only word-level attention or evidence-level attention, which may result in suboptimal performance.In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Multihead Attentive Network to fact-check textual claims.Our model jointly combines multi-head word-level attention and multihead document-level attention, which aid explanation in both word-level and evidencelevel.Experiments on two real-word datasets show that our model outperforms seven stateof-the-art baselines.Improvements over baselines are from 6% to 18%.Our source code and datasets are released at https:// github.com/nguyenvo09/EACL2021.

Although many fact-checking systems have been developed in academia and industry, fake news is still proliferating on social media. These systems mostly focus on fact-checking but usually neglect online users who are the main drivers of the spread of misinformation. How can we use fact-checked information to improve users' consciousness of fake news to which they are exposed? How can we stop users from spreading fake news? To tackle these questions, we propose a novel framework to search for fact-checking articles, which address the content of an original tweet (that may contain misinformation) posted by online users. The search can directly warn fake news posters and online users (e.g. the posters' followers) about misinformation, discourage them from spreading fake news, and scale up verified content on social media. Our framework uses both text and images to search for fact-checking articles, and achieves promising results on real-world datasets. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/nguyenvo09/EMNLP2020.

Extracting structured data from HTML documents is a long-studied problem with a broad range of applications like augmenting knowledge bases, supporting faceted search, and providing domain-specific experiences for key verticals like shopping and movies. Previous approaches have either required a small number of examples for each target site or relied on carefully handcrafted heuristics built over visual renderings of websites. In this paper, we present a novel two-stage neural approach, named FreeDOM, which overcomes both these limitations. The first stage learns a representation for each DOM node in the page by combining both the text and markup information. The second stage captures longer range distance and semantic relatedness using a relational neural network. By combining these stages, FreeDOM is able to generalize to unseen sites after training on a small number of seed sites from that vertical without requiring expensive hand-crafted features over visual renderings of the page. Through experiments on a public dataset with 8 different verticals, we show that FreeDOM beats the previous state of the art by nearly 3.7 F1 points on average without requiring features over rendered pages or expensive hand-crafted features.

To combat fake news, researchers mostly focused on detecting fake news and journalists built and maintained fact-checking sites (e.g., Snopes.com and Politifact.com). However, fake news dissemination has been greatly promoted via social media sites, and these fact-checking sites have not been fully utilized. To overcome these problems and complement existing methods against fake news, in this paper we propose a deep-learning based fact-checking URL recommender system to mitigate impact of fake news in social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. In particular, our proposed framework consists of a multi-relational attentive module and a heterogeneous graph attention network to learn complex/semantic relationship between user-URL pairs, user-user pairs, and URL-URL pairs. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset show that our proposed framework outperforms eight state-of-the-art recommendation models, achieving at least 3$\sim$5.3% improvement. Our source code and dataset are available at \urlhttps://web.cs.wpi.edu/~kmlee/data.html .

In fighting against fake news, many fact-checking systems comprised of human-based fact-checking sites (e.g., snopes.com and politifact.com) and automatic detection systems have been developed in recent years. However, online users still keep sharing fake news even when it has been debunked. It means that early fake news detection may be insufficient and we need another complementary approach to mitigate the spread of misinformation. In this paper, we introduce a novel application of text generation for combating fake news. In particular, we (1) leverage online users named fact-checkers, who cite fact-checking sites as credible evidences to fact-check information in public discourse; (2) analyze linguistic characteristics of fact-checking tweets; and (3) propose and build a deep learning framework to generate responses with fact-checking intention to increase the fact-checkers' engagement in fact-checking activities. Our analysis reveals that the fact-checkers tend to refute misinformation and use formal language (e.g. few swear words and Internet slangs). Our framework successfully generates relevant responses, and outperforms competing models by achieving up to 30% improvements. Our qualitative study also confirms that the superiority of our generated responses compared with responses generated from the existing models.

Recent studies show that an overwhelming majority of emails are machine-generated and sent by businesses to consumers. Many large email services are interested in extracting structured data from such emails to enable intelligent assistants. This allows experiences like being able to answer questions such as “What is the address of my hotel in New York?” or “When does my flight leave?”. A high-quality email classifier is a critical piece in such a system. In this paper, we argue that the rich formatting used in business-to-consumer emails contains valuable information that can be used to learn better representations. Most existing methods focus only on textual content and ignore the rich HTML structure of emails. We introduce RiSER (Richly Structured Email Representation) - an approach for incorporating both the structure and content of emails. RiSER projects the email into a vector representation by jointly encoding the HTML structure and the words in the email. We then use this representation to train a classifier. To our knowledge, this is the first description of a neural technique for combining formatting information along with the content to learn improved representations for richly formatted emails. Experimenting with a large corpus of emails received by users of Gmail, we show that RiSER outperforms strong attention-based LSTM baselines. We expect that these benefits will extend to other corpora with richly formatted documents. We also demonstrate with examples where leveraging HTML structure leads to better predictions.

A large body of research work and efforts have been focused on detecting fake news and building online fact-check systems in order to debunk fake news as soon as possible. Despite the existence of these systems, fake news is still wildly shared by online users. It indicates that these systems may not be fully utilized. After detecting fake news, what is the next step to stop people from sharing it? How can we improve the utilization of these fact-check systems? To fill this gap, in this paper, we (i) collect and analyze online users called guardians, who correct misinformation and fake news in online discussions by referring fact-checking URLs; and (ii) propose a novel fact-checking URL recommendation model to encourage the guardians to engage more in fact-checking activities. We found that the guardians usually took less than one day to reply to claims in online conversations and took another day to spread verified information to hundreds of millions of followers. Our proposed recommendation model outperformed four state-of-the-art models by 11%~33%. Our source code and dataset are available at http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~kmlee/data/gau.html.

In Crowdfunding platforms, people turn their prototype ideas into real products by raising money from the crowd, or invest in someone else's projects. In reward-based crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, selecting accurate reward delivery duration becomes crucial for creators, backers, and platform providers to keep the trust between the creators and the backers, and the trust between the platform providers and users. According to Kickstarter, 35% backers did not receive rewards on time. Unfortunately, little is known about on-time and late reward delivery projects, and there is no prior work to estimate reward delivery duration. To fill the gap, in this paper, we (i) extract novel features that reveal latent difficulty levels of project rewards; (ii) build predictive models to identify whether a creator will deliver all rewards in a project on time or not; and (iii) build a regression model to estimate accurate reward delivery duration (i.e., how long it will take to produce and deliver all the rewards). Experimental results show that our models achieve good performance -- 82.5% accuracy, 78.1 RMSE, and 0.108 NRMSE at the first 5% of the longest reward delivery duration.

Retweeting/sharing action has enabled information to be cascaded to distant nodes on social network. Unfortunately, malicious users as a group have taken advantage of the retweeting function with coordinated behavior to falsely distort the volume of specific keywords, topics or URLs for promotional purposes (e.g., spreading fake news, and increasing public visibility of products or services). Unfortunately, little is known about their retweeting behavior as a group and how to detect them based on group-based signals. To fill the gap, in this paper, we (i) propose Attractor+ algorithm to extract retweeter groups, members of each of which have similar retweeting behavior; (ii) analyze underlying characteristics of malicious and legitimate retweeter groups; (iii) propose group-based features to catch synchronized and coordinated behavior; and build a predictor to classify if a group is malicious. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperformed existing approaches.

Detecting groups of users, who have similar opinions, interests, or social behavior, has become an important task for many applications. A recent study showed that dynamic distance based Attractor, a community detection algorithm, outperformed other community detection algorithms such as Spectral clustering, Louvain and Infomap, achieving higher Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) and Adjusted Rand Index (ARI). However, Attractor often takes long time to detect communities, requiring many iterations. To overcome the drawback and handle large-scale graphs, in this paper we propose MRAttractor, an advanced version of Attractor to be runnable on a MapReduce framework. In particular, we (i) apply a sliding window technique to reduce the running time, keeping the same community detection quality; (ii) design and implement the Attractor algorithm for a MapReduce framework; and (iii) evaluate MRAttractor's performance on synthetic and real-world datasets. Experimental results show that our algorithm significantly reduced running time and was able to handle large-scale graphs.