Yejun Yoon

Hyewon Choi, Yejun Yoon, Seunghyun Yoon et al.

This study investigates how fake news uses a thumbnail for a news article with a focus on whether a news article's thumbnail represents the news content correctly. A news article shared with an irrelevant thumbnail can mislead readers into having a wrong impression of the issue, especially in social media environments where users are less likely to click the link and consume the entire content. We propose to capture the degree of semantic incongruity in the multimodal relation by using the pretrained CLIP representation. From a source-level analysis, we found that fake news employs a more incongruous image to the main content than general news. Going further, we attempted to detect news articles with image-text incongruity. Evaluation experiments suggest that CLIP-based methods can successfully detect news articles in which the thumbnail is semantically irrelevant to news text. This study contributes to the research by providing a novel view on tackling online fake news and misinformation. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/ssu-humane/fake-news-thumbnail.

Yejun Yoon, Seunghyun Yoon, Kunwoo Park

This paper addresses the critical challenge of assessing the representativeness of news thumbnail images, which often serve as the first visual engagement for readers when an article is disseminated on social media. We focus on whether a news image represents the actors discussed in the news text. To serve the challenge, we introduce NewsTT, a manually annotated dataset of 1000 news thumbnail images and text pairs. We found that the pretrained vision and language models, such as BLIP-2, struggle with this task. Since news subjects frequently involve named entities or proper nouns, the pretrained models could have a limited capability to match news actors' visual and textual appearances. We hypothesize that learning to contrast news text with its counterfactual, of which named entities are replaced, can enhance the cross-modal matching ability of vision and language models. We propose CFT-CLIP, a contrastive learning framework that updates vision and language bi-encoders according to the hypothesis. We found that our simple method can boost the performance for assessing news thumbnail representativeness, supporting our assumption. Code and data can be accessed at https://github.com/ssu-humane/news-images-acl24.