Chris Brogly

Austin McCutcheon, Thiago E. A. de Oliveira, Aleksandr Zheleznov et al.

The proliferation of online news enables potential widespread publication of perceived low-quality news headlines/links. As a result, we investigated whether it was possible to automatically distinguish perceived lower-quality news headlines/links from perceived higher-quality headlines/links. We evaluated twelve machine learning models on a binary, balanced dataset of 57,544,214 worldwide news website links/headings from 2018-2024 (28,772,107 per class) with 115 extracted linguistic features. Binary labels for each text were derived from scores based on expert consensus regarding the respective news domain quality. Traditional ensemble methods, particularly the bagging classifier, had strong performance (88.1% accuracy, 88.3% F1, 80/20 train/test split). Fine-tuned DistilBERT achieved the highest accuracy (90.3%, 80/20 train/test split) but required more training time. The results suggest that both NLP features with traditional classifiers and deep learning models can effectively differentiate perceived news headline/link quality, with some trade-off between predictive performance and train time.

Chris Brogly, Connor McElroy

The release of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Copilot is changing the way text is created and may influence the content that we find on the web. This study investigated whether the release of these two popular LLMs coincided with a change in writing style in headlines and links on worldwide news websites. 175 NLP features were obtained for each text in a dataset of 451 million headlines/links. An interrupted time series analysis was applied for each of the 175 NLP features to evaluate whether there were any statistically significant sustained changes after the release dates of ChatGPT and/or Copilot. There were a total of 44 features that did not appear to have any significant sustained change after the release of ChatGPT/Copilot. A total of 91 other features did show significant change with ChatGPT and/or Copilot although significance with earlier control LLM release dates (GPT-1/2/3, Gopher) removed them from consideration. This initial analysis suggests these language models may have had a limited impact on the style of individual news headlines/links, with respect to only some NLP measures.

Chris Brogly, Saif Rjaibi, Charlotte Liang et al.

Small Language Models (SLMs) have potential to be used for automatically labelling and identifying aspects of text data for medicine/health-related purposes from documents and the web. As their resource requirements are significantly lower than Large Language Models (LLMs), these can be deployed potentially on more types of devices. SLMs often are benchmarked on health/medicine-related tasks, such as MedQA, although performance on these can vary especially depending on the size of the model in terms of number of parameters. Furthermore, these test results may not necessarily reflect real-world performance regarding the automatic labelling or identification of texts in documents and the web. As a result, we compared topic-relatedness scores from Microsofts phi-3-mini-4k-instruct SLM to the topic-relatedness scores from 7 human evaluators on 1144 samples of medical/health-related texts and 1117 samples of sports injury-related texts. These texts were from a larger dataset of about 9 million news headlines, each of which were processed and assigned scores by phi-3-mini-4k-instruct. Our sample was selected (filtered) based on 1 (low filtering) or more (high filtering) Boolean conditions on the phi-3 SLM scores. We found low-moderate significant correlations between the scores from the SLM and human evaluators for sports injury texts with low filtering (\r{ho} = 0.3413, p < 0.001) and medicine/health texts with high filtering (\r{ho} = 0.3854, p < 0.001), and low significant correlation for medicine/health texts with low filtering (\r{ho} = 0.2255, p < 0.001). There was negligible, insignificant correlation for sports injury-related texts with high filtering (\r{ho} = 0.0318, p = 0.4466).