Rajesh Sharma

Faiz Ali Shah, Ahmed Sabir, Rajesh Sharma et al.

Automatic analysis of user reviews to understand user sentiments toward app functionality (i.e. app features) helps align development efforts with user expectations and needs. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have shown impressive performance on several new tasks without updating the model's parameters i.e. using zero or a few labeled examples, but the capabilities of LLMs are yet unexplored for feature-specific sentiment analysis. The goal of our study is to explore the capabilities of LLMs to perform feature-specific sentiment analysis of user reviews. This study compares the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and different variants of Llama-2 chat, against previous approaches for extracting app features and associated sentiments in zero-shot, 1-shot, and 5-shot scenarios. The results indicate that GPT-4 outperforms the rule-based SAFE by 17% in f1-score for extracting app features in the zero-shot scenario, with 5-shot further improving it by 6%. However, the fine-tuned RE-BERT exceeds GPT-4 by 6% in f1-score. For predicting positive and neutral sentiments, GPT-4 achieves f1-scores of 76% and 45% in the zero-shot setting, which improve by 7% and 23% in the 5-shot setting, respectively. Our study conducts a thorough evaluation of both proprietary and open-source LLMs to provide an objective assessment of their performance in extracting feature-sentiment pairs.

Shakshi Sharma, Anwitaman Datta, Vigneshwaran Shankaran et al.

We demonstrate the Misinformation Concierge, a proof-of-concept that provides actionable intelligence on misinformation prevalent in social media. Specifically, it uses language processing and machine learning tools to identify subtopics of discourse and discern non/misleading posts; presents statistical reports for policy-makers to understand the big picture of prevalent misinformation in a timely manner; and recommends rebuttal messages for specific pieces of misinformation, identified from within the corpus of data - providing means to intervene and counter misinformation promptly. The Misinformation Concierge proof-of-concept using a curated dataset is accessible at: https://demo-frontend-uy34.onrender.com/

Shakshi Sharma, Anwitaman Datta, Rajesh Sharma

Misinformation has emerged as a major societal threat in recent years in general; specifically in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has wrecked havoc, for instance, by fuelling vaccine hesitancy. Cost-effective, scalable solutions for combating misinformation are the need of the hour. This work explored how existing information obtained from social media and augmented with more curated fact checked data repositories can be harnessed to facilitate automated rebuttal of misinformation at scale. While the ideas herein can be generalized and reapplied in the broader context of misinformation mitigation using a multitude of information sources and catering to the spectrum of social media platforms, this work serves as a proof of concept, and as such, it is confined in its scope to only rebuttal of tweets, and in the specific context of misinformation regarding COVID-19. It leverages two publicly available datasets, viz. FaCov (fact-checked articles) and misleading (social media Twitter) data on COVID-19 Vaccination.

Orchid Chetia Phukan, Arun Balaji Buduru, Rajesh Sharma

Pre-trained models (PTMs) have shown great promise in the speech and audio domain. Embeddings leveraged from these models serve as inputs for learning algorithms with applications in various downstream tasks. One such crucial task is Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) which has a wide range of applications, including dynamic analysis of customer calls, mental health assessment, and personalized language learning. PTM embeddings have helped advance SER, however, a comprehensive comparison of these PTM embeddings that consider multiple facets such as embedding model architecture, data used for pre-training, and the pre-training procedure being followed is missing. A thorough comparison of PTM embeddings will aid in the faster and more efficient development of models and enable their deployment in real-world scenarios. In this work, we exploit this research gap and perform a comparative analysis of embeddings extracted from eight speech and audio PTMs (wav2vec 2.0, data2vec, wavLM, UniSpeech-SAT, wav2clip, YAMNet, x-vector, ECAPA). We perform an extensive empirical analysis with four speech emotion datasets (CREMA-D, TESS, SAVEE, Emo-DB) by training three algorithms (XGBoost, Random Forest, FCN) on the derived embeddings. The results of our study indicate that the best performance is achieved by algorithms trained on embeddings derived from PTMs trained for speaker recognition followed by wav2clip and UniSpeech-SAT. This can relay that the top performance by embeddings from speaker recognition PTMs is most likely due to the model taking up information about numerous speech features such as tone, accent, pitch, and so on during its speaker recognition training. Insights from this work will assist future studies in their selection of embeddings for applications related to SER.

Rahul Goel, Angelo Furno, Rajesh Sharma

Socio-economic indicators provide context for assessing a country's overall condition. These indicators contain information about education, gender, poverty, employment, and other factors. Therefore, reliable and accurate information is critical for social research and government policing. Most data sources available today, such as censuses, have sparse population coverage or are updated infrequently. Nonetheless, alternative data sources, such as call data records (CDR) and mobile app usage, can serve as cost-effective and up-to-date sources for identifying socio-economic indicators. This work investigates mobile app data to predict socio-economic features. We present a large-scale study using data that captures the traffic of thousands of mobile applications by approximately 30 million users distributed over 550,000 km square and served by over 25,000 base stations. The dataset covers the whole France territory and spans more than 2.5 months, starting from 16th March 2019 to 6th June 2019. Using the app usage patterns, our best model can estimate socio-economic indicators (attaining an R-squared score upto 0.66). Furthermore, using models' explainability, we discover that mobile app usage patterns have the potential to reveal socio-economic disparities in IRIS. Insights of this study provide several avenues for future interventions, including user temporal network analysis to understand evolving network patterns and exploration of alternative data sources.

Gustav Nikopensius, Mohit Mayank, Orchid Chetia Phukan et al.

Fact-checking is a crucial task as it ensures the prevention of misinformation. However, manual fact-checking cannot keep up with the rate at which false information is generated and disseminated online. Automated fact-checking by machines is significantly quicker than by humans. But for better trust and transparency of these automated systems, explainability in the fact-checking process is necessary. Fact-checking often entails contrasting a factual assertion with a body of knowledge for such explanations. An effective way of representing knowledge is the Knowledge Graph (KG). There have been sufficient works proposed related to fact-checking with the usage of KG but not much focus is given to the application of reinforcement learning (RL) in such cases. To mitigate this gap, we propose an RL-based KG reasoning approach for explainable fact-checking. Extensive experiments on FB15K-277 and NELL-995 datasets reveal that reasoning over a KG is an effective way of producing human-readable explanations in the form of paths and classifications for fact claims. The RL reasoning agent computes a path that either proves or disproves a factual claim, but does not provide a verdict itself. A verdict is reached by a voting mechanism that utilizes paths produced by the agent. These paths can be presented to human readers so that they themselves can decide whether or not the provided evidence is convincing or not. This work will encourage works in this direction for incorporating RL for explainable fact-checking as it increases trustworthiness by providing a human-in-the-loop approach.

Orchid Chetia Phukan, Sarthak Jain, Swarup Ranjan Behera et al.

In this study, for the first time, we extensively investigate whether music foundation models (MFMs) or speech foundation models (SFMs) work better for singing voice deepfake detection (SVDD), which has recently attracted attention in the research community. For this, we perform a comprehensive comparative study of state-of-the-art (SOTA) MFMs (MERT variants and music2vec) and SFMs (pre-trained for general speech representation learning as well as speaker recognition). We show that speaker recognition SFM representations perform the best amongst all the foundation models (FMs), and this performance can be attributed to its higher efficacy in capturing the pitch, tone, intensity, etc, characteristics present in singing voices. To our end, we also explore the fusion of FMs for exploiting their complementary behavior for improved SVDD, and we propose a novel framework, FIONA for the same. With FIONA, through the synchronization of x-vector (speaker recognition SFM) and MERT-v1-330M (MFM), we report the best performance with the lowest Equal Error Rate (EER) of 13.74 %, beating all the individual FMs as well as baseline FM fusions and achieving SOTA results.

Nandini Arimanda, Achyuth Mukund, Sakthi Balan Muthiah et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at human-like language generation but often embed and amplify implicit, intersectional biases, especially under persona-driven contexts. Existing bias audits rely on static, embedding-based tests (CEAT, I-WEAT, I-SEAT) that quantify absolute association strengths. We show that they have limitations in capturing dynamic shifts when models adopt social roles. We address this gap by introducing the Bias Amplification Differential and Explainability Score (BADx): a novel, scalable metric that measures persona-induced bias amplification and integrates local explainability insights. BADx comprises three components - differential bias scores (BAD, based on CEAT, I-WEAT, I-SEAT),Persona Sensitivity Index (PSI), and Volatility (Standard Deviation), augmented by LIME-based analysis for emphasizing explainability. This study is divided and performed as two different tasks. Task 1 establishes static bias baselines, and Task 2 applies six persona frames (marginalized and structurally advantaged) to measure BADx, PSI, and volatility. This is studied across five state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-4o, DeepSeek-R1, LLaMA-4, Claude 4.0 Sonnet and Gemma-3n E4B). Results show persona context significantly modulates bias. GPT-4o exhibits high sensitivity and volatility; DeepSeek-R1 suppresses bias but with erratic volatility; LLaMA-4 maintains low volatility and a stable bias profile with limited amplification; Claude 4.0 Sonnet achieves balanced modulation; and Gemma-3n E4B attains the lowest volatility with moderate amplification. BADx performs better than static methods by revealing context-sensitive biases overlooked in static methods. Our unified method offers a systematic way to detect dynamic implicit intersectional bias in five popular LLMs.

Swapnil Mane, Suman Kundu, Rajesh Sharma

The rise of social media platforms has led to an increase in cyber-aggressive behavior, encompassing a broad spectrum of hostile behavior, including cyberbullying, online harassment, and the dissemination of offensive and hate speech. These behaviors have been associated with significant societal consequences, ranging from online anonymity to real-world outcomes such as depression, suicidal tendencies, and, in some instances, offline violence. Recognizing the societal risks associated with unchecked aggressive content, this paper delves into the field of Aggression Content Detection and Behavioral Analysis of Aggressive Users, aiming to bridge the gap between disparate studies. In this paper, we analyzed the diversity of definitions and proposed a unified cyber-aggression definition. We examine the comprehensive process of Aggression Content Detection, spanning from dataset creation, feature selection and extraction, and detection algorithm development. Further, we review studies on Behavioral Analysis of Aggression that explore the influencing factors, consequences, and patterns associated with cyber-aggressive behavior. This systematic literature review is a cross-examination of content detection and behavioral analysis in the realm of cyber-aggression. The integrated investigation reveals the effectiveness of incorporating sociological insights into computational techniques for preventing cyber-aggressive behavior. Finally, the paper concludes by identifying research gaps and encouraging further progress in the unified domain of socio-computational aggressive behavior analysis.

Ahmed Sabir, Markus Kängsepp, Rajesh Sharma

The increased use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in sensitive domains leads to growing interest in how their confidence scores correspond to fairness and bias. This study examines the alignment between LLM-predicted confidence and human-annotated bias judgments. Focusing on gender bias, the research investigates probability confidence calibration in contexts involving gendered pronoun resolution. The goal is to evaluate if calibration metrics based on predicted confidence scores effectively capture fairness-related disparities in LLMs. The results show that, among the six state-of-the-art models, Gemma-2 demonstrates the worst calibration according to the gender bias benchmark. The primary contribution of this work is a fairness-aware evaluation of LLMs' confidence calibration, offering guidance for ethical deployment. In addition, we introduce a new calibration metric, Gender-ECE, designed to measure gender disparities in resolution tasks.

Do-hyeon Yoon, Minsoo Chun, Thomas Allen et al.

Large language models (LLMs) face significant copyright and intellectual property challenges as the cost of training increases and model reuse becomes prevalent. While watermarking techniques have been proposed to protect model ownership, they may not be robust to continue training and development, posing serious threats to model attribution and copyright protection. This work introduces a simple yet effective approach for robust LLM fingerprinting based on intrinsic model characteristics. We discover that the standard deviation distributions of attention parameter matrices across different layers exhibit distinctive patterns that remain stable even after extensive continued training. These parameter distribution signatures serve as robust fingerprints that can reliably identify model lineage and detect potential copyright infringement. Our experimental validation across multiple model families demonstrates the effectiveness of our method for model authentication. Notably, our investigation uncovers evidence that a recently Pangu Pro MoE model released by Huawei is derived from Qwen-2.5 14B model through upcycling techniques rather than training from scratch, highlighting potential cases of model plagiarism, copyright violation, and information fabrication. These findings underscore the critical importance of developing robust fingerprinting methods for protecting intellectual property in large-scale model development and emphasize that deliberate continued training alone is insufficient to completely obscure model origins.

Vigneshwaran Shankaran, Rajesh Sharma

Online social media has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its ease of access and ability to connect with others. One of social media's main draws is its anonymity, allowing users to share their thoughts and opinions without fear of judgment or retribution. This anonymity has also made social media prone to harmful content, which requires moderation to ensure responsible and productive use. Several methods using artificial intelligence have been employed to detect harmful content. However, conversation and contextual analysis of hate speech are still understudied. Most promising works only analyze a single text at a time rather than the conversation supporting it. In this work, we employ a tree-based approach to understand how users behave concerning toxicity in public conversation settings. To this end, we collect both the posts and the comment sections of the top 100 posts from 8 Reddit communities that allow profanity, totaling over 1 million responses. We find that toxic comments increase the likelihood of subsequent toxic comments being produced in online conversations. Our analysis also shows that immediate context plays a vital role in shaping a response rather than the original post. We also study the effect of consensual profanity and observe overlapping similarities with non-consensual profanity in terms of user behavior and patterns.

Orchid Chetia Phukan, Gautam Siddharth Kashyap, Arun Balaji Buduru et al.

Availability of representations from pre-trained models (PTMs) have facilitated substantial progress in speech emotion recognition (SER). Particularly, representations from PTM trained for paralinguistic speech processing have shown state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for SER. However, such paralinguistic PTM representations haven't been evaluated for SER in linguistic environments other than English. Also, paralinguistic PTM representations haven't been investigated in benchmarks such as SUPERB, EMO-SUPERB, ML-SUPERB for SER. This makes it difficult to access the efficacy of paralinguistic PTM representations for SER in multiple languages. To fill this gap, we perform a comprehensive comparative study of five SOTA PTM representations. Our results shows that paralinguistic PTM (TRILLsson) representations performs the best and this performance can be attributed to its effectiveness in capturing pitch, tone and other speech characteristics more effectively than other PTM representations.

Ahmed Sabir, Rajesh Sharma

In this work, we investigate the correlation between gender and contextual biases, focusing on elements such as action verbs, object nouns, and particularly on occupations. We introduce a novel dataset, GenderLexicon, and a framework that can estimate contextual bias and its related gender bias. Our model can interpret the bias with a score and thus improve the explainability of gender bias. Also, our findings confirm the existence of gender biases beyond occupational stereotypes. To validate our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness, we conduct evaluations on five diverse datasets, including a Japanese dataset.

Ahmed Sabir, Azinovič Gasper, Mengsay Loem et al.

Cross-cultural research in perception and cognition has shown that individuals from different cultural backgrounds process visual information in distinct ways. East Asians, for example, tend to adopt a holistic perspective, attending to contextual relationships, whereas Westerners often employ an analytical approach, focusing on individual objects and their attributes. In this study, we investigate whether Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained predominantly on different languages, specifically Japanese and English, exhibit similar culturally grounded attentional patterns. Using comparative analysis of image descriptions, we examine whether these models reflect differences in holistic versus analytic tendencies. Our findings suggest that VLMs not only internalize the structural properties of language but also reproduce cultural behaviors embedded in the training data, indicating that cultural cognition may implicitly shape model outputs.

Orchid Chetia Phukan, Mohd Mujtaba Akhtar, Girish et al.

As video-sharing platforms have grown over the past decade, child viewership has surged, increasing the need for precise detection of harmful content like violence or explicit scenes. Malicious users exploit moderation systems by embedding unsafe content in minimal frames to evade detection. While prior research has focused on visual cues and advanced such fine-grained detection, audio features remain underexplored. In this study, we embed audio cues with visual for fine-grained child harmful content detection and introduce SNIFR, a novel framework for effective alignment. SNIFR employs a transformer encoder for intra-modality interaction, followed by a cascaded cross-transformer for inter-modality alignment. Our approach achieves superior performance over unimodal and baseline fusion methods, setting a new state-of-the-art.

Soda Marem Lo, Oscar Araque, Rajesh Sharma et al.

Canceling is a morally-driven phenomenon that hinders the development of safe social media platforms and contributes to ideological polarization. To address this issue we present the Canceling Attitudes Detection (CADE) dataset, an annotated corpus of canceling incidents aimed at exploring the factors of disagreements in evaluating people canceling attitudes on social media. Specifically, we study the impact of annotators' morality in their perception of canceling, showing that morality is an independent axis for the explanation of disagreement on this phenomenon. Annotator's judgments heavily depend on the type of controversial events and involved celebrities. This shows the need to develop more event-centric datasets to better understand how harms are perpetrated in social media and to develop more aware technologies for their detection.

Abhay Kumar, Vigneshwaran Shankaran, Rajesh Sharma

In the recent years online social media platforms has been flooded with hateful remarks such as racism, sexism, homophobia etc. As a result, there have been many measures taken by various social media platforms to mitigate the spread of hate-speech over the internet. One particular concept within the domain of hate speech is instigating hate, which involves provoking hatred against a particular community, race, colour, gender, religion or ethnicity. In this work, we introduce \textit{ProvocationProbe} - a dataset designed to explore what distinguishes instigating hate speech from general hate speech. For this study, we collected around twenty thousand tweets from Twitter, encompassing a total of nine global controversies. These controversies span various themes including racism, politics, and religion. In this paper, i) we present an annotated dataset after comprehensive examination of all the controversies, ii) we also highlight the difference between hate speech and instigating hate speech by identifying distinguishing features, such as targeted identity attacks and reasons for hate.

Orchid Chetia Phukan, Priyabrata Mallick, Swarup Ranjan Behera et al.

In this paper, we work towards extending Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) to multilingual settings. Existing AVQA research has predominantly revolved around English and replicating it for addressing AVQA in other languages requires a substantial allocation of resources. As a scalable solution, we leverage machine translation and present two multilingual AVQA datasets for eight languages created from existing benchmark AVQA datasets. This prevents extra human annotation efforts of collecting questions and answers manually. To this end, we propose, MERA framework, by leveraging state-of-the-art (SOTA) video, audio, and textual foundation models for AVQA in multiple languages. We introduce a suite of models namely MERA-L, MERA-C, MERA-T with varied model architectures to benchmark the proposed datasets. We believe our work will open new research directions and act as a reference benchmark for future works in multilingual AVQA.

Aditya Narayan Sankaran, Vigneshwaran Shankaran, Sampath Lonka et al.

Rhymes and poems are a powerful medium for transmitting cultural norms and societal roles. However, the pervasive existence of gender stereotypes in these works perpetuates biased perceptions and limits the scope of individuals' identities. Past works have shown that stereotyping and prejudice emerge in early childhood, and developmental research on causal mechanisms is critical for understanding and controlling stereotyping and prejudice. This work contributes by gathering a dataset of rhymes and poems to identify gender stereotypes and propose a model with 97% accuracy to identify gender bias. Gender stereotypes were rectified using a Large Language Model (LLM) and its effectiveness was evaluated in a comparative survey against human educator rectifications. To summarize, this work highlights the pervasive nature of gender stereotypes in literary works and reveals the potential of LLMs to rectify gender stereotypes. This study raises awareness and promotes inclusivity within artistic expressions, making a significant contribution to the discourse on gender equality.

Animesh Chaturvedi, Rajesh Sharma

Hate speech classification has become an important problem due to the spread of hate speech on social media platforms. For a given set of Hate Terms lists (HTs-lists) and Hate Speech data (HS-data), it is challenging to understand which hate term contributes the most for hate speech classification. This paper contributes two approaches to quantitatively measure and qualitatively visualise the relationship between co-occurring Hate Terms (HTs). Firstly, we propose an approach for the classification of hate-speech by producing a Severe Hate Terms list (Severe HTs-list) from existing HTs-lists. To achieve our goal, we proposed three metrics (Hatefulness, Relativeness, and Offensiveness) to measure the severity of HTs. These metrics assist to create an Inter-agreement HTs-list, which explains the contribution of an individual hate term toward hate speech classification. Then, we used the Offensiveness metric values of HTs above a proposed threshold minimum Offense (minOffense) to generate a new Severe HTs-list. To evaluate our approach, we used three hate speech datasets and six hate terms lists. Our approach shown an improvement from 0.845 to 0.923 (best) as compared to the baseline. Secondly, we also proposed Stable Hate Rule (SHR) mining to provide ordered co-occurrence of various HTs with minimum Stability (minStab). The SHR mining detects frequently co-occurring HTs to form Stable Hate Rules and Concepts. These rules and concepts are used to visualise the graphs of Transitivities and Lattices formed by HTs.

Mudit Dhawan, Shakshi Sharma, Aditya Kadam et al.

Social media in present times has a significant and growing influence. Fake news being spread on these platforms have a disruptive and damaging impact on our lives. Furthermore, as multimedia content improves the visibility of posts more than text data, it has been observed that often multimedia is being used for creating fake content. A plethora of previous multimodal-based work has tried to address the problem of modeling heterogeneous modalities in identifying fake content. However, these works have the following limitations: (1) inefficient encoding of inter-modal relations by utilizing a simple concatenation operator on the modalities at a later stage in a model, which might result in information loss; (2) training very deep neural networks with a disproportionate number of parameters on small but complex real-life multimodal datasets result in higher chances of overfitting. To address these limitations, we propose GAME-ON, a Graph Neural Network based end-to-end trainable framework that allows granular interactions within and across different modalities to learn more robust data representations for multimodal fake news detection. We use two publicly available fake news datasets, Twitter and Weibo, for evaluations. Our model outperforms on Twitter by an average of 11% and keeps competitive performance on Weibo, within a 2.6% margin, while using 65% fewer parameters than the best comparable state-of-the-art baseline.

Rahul Goel, Modar Sulaiman, Kimia Noorbakhsh et al.

Facial images disclose many hidden personal traits such as age, gender, race, health, emotion, and psychology. Understanding these traits will help to classify the people in different attributes. In this paper, we have presented a novel method for classifying images using a pretrained transformer model. We apply the pretrained transformer for the binary classification of facial images in criminal and non-criminal classes. The pretrained transformer of GPT-2 is trained to generate text and then fine-tuned to classify facial images. During the finetuning process with images, most of the layers of GT-2 are frozen during backpropagation and the model is frozen pretrained transformer (FPT). The FPT acts as a universal image classifier, and this paper shows the application of FPT on facial images. We also use our FPT on encrypted images for classification. Our FPT shows high accuracy on both raw facial images and encrypted images. We hypothesize the meta-learning capacity FPT gained because of its large size and trained on a large size with theory and experiments. The GPT-2 trained to generate a single word token at a time, through the autoregressive process, forced to heavy-tail distribution. Then the FPT uses the heavy-tail property as its meta-learning capacity for classifying images. Our work shows one way to avoid bias during the machine classification of images.The FPT encodes worldly knowledge because of the pretraining of one text, which it uses during the classification. The statistical error of classification is reduced because of the added context gained from the text.Our paper shows the ethical dimension of using encrypted data for classification.Criminal images are sensitive to share across the boundary but encrypted largely evades ethical concern.FPT showing good classification accuracy on encrypted images shows promise for further research on privacy-preserving machine learning.

Sabur Butt, Shakshi Sharma, Rajesh Sharma et al.

In recent years, the problem of rumours on online social media (OSM) has attracted lots of attention. Researchers have started investigating from two main directions. First is the descriptive analysis of rumours and secondly, proposing techniques to detect (or classify) rumours. In the descriptive line of works, where researchers have tried to analyse rumours using NLP approaches, there isnt much emphasis on psycho-linguistics analyses of social media text. These kinds of analyses on rumour case studies are vital for drawing meaningful conclusions to mitigate misinformation. For our analysis, we explored the PHEME9 rumour dataset (consisting of 9 events), including source tweets (both rumour and non-rumour categories) and response tweets. We compared the rumour and nonrumour source tweets and then their corresponding reply (response) tweets to understand how they differ linguistically for every incident. Furthermore, we also evaluated if these features can be used for classifying rumour vs. non-rumour tweets through machine learning models. To this end, we employed various classical and ensemble-based approaches. To filter out the highly discriminative psycholinguistic features, we explored the SHAP AI Explainability tool. To summarise, this research contributes by performing an in-depth psycholinguistic analysis of rumours related to various kinds of events.

Shakshi Sharma, Rajesh Sharma, Anwitaman Datta

In this work, we collect a moderate-sized representative corpus of tweets (200,000 approx.) pertaining Covid-19 vaccination spanning over a period of seven months (September 2020 - March 2021). Following a Transfer Learning approach, we utilize the pre-trained Transformer-based XLNet model to classify tweets as Misleading or Non-Misleading and validate against a random subset of results manually. We build on this to study and contrast the characteristics of tweets in the corpus that are misleading in nature against non-misleading ones. This exploratory analysis enables us to design features (such as sentiments, hashtags, nouns, pronouns, etc) that can, in turn, be exploited for classifying tweets as (Non-)Misleading using various ML models in an explainable manner. Specifically, several ML models are employed for prediction, with up to 90% accuracy, and the importance of each feature is explained using SHAP Explainable AI (XAI) tool. While the thrust of this work is principally exploratory analysis in order to obtain insights on the online discourse on Covid-19 vaccination, we conclude the paper by outlining how these insights provide the foundations for a more actionable approach to mitigate misinformation. The curated dataset and code is made available (Github repository) so that the research community at large can reproduce, compare against, or build upon this work.

Mohit Mayank, Shakshi Sharma, Rajesh Sharma

Fake News on social media platforms has attracted a lot of attention in recent times, primarily for events related to politics (2016 US Presidential elections), healthcare (infodemic during COVID-19), to name a few. Various methods have been proposed for detecting Fake News. The approaches span from exploiting techniques related to network analysis, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and the usage of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). In this work, we propose DEAP-FAKED, a knowleDgE grAPh FAKe nEws Detection framework for identifying Fake News. Our approach is a combination of the NLP -- where we encode the news content, and the GNN technique -- where we encode the Knowledge Graph (KG). A variety of these encodings provides a complementary advantage to our detector. We evaluate our framework using two publicly available datasets containing articles from domains such as politics, business, technology, and healthcare. As part of dataset pre-processing, we also remove the bias, such as the source of the articles, which could impact the performance of the models. DEAP-FAKED obtains an F1-score of 88% and 78% for the two datasets, which is an improvement of 21%, and 3% respectively, which shows the effectiveness of the approach.

Raj Jagtap, Abhinav Kumar, Rahul Goel et al.

Millions of people use platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other mass media. Due to the accessibility of these platforms, they are often used to establish a narrative, conduct propaganda, and disseminate misinformation. This work proposes an approach that uses state-of-the-art NLP techniques to extract features from video captions (subtitles). To evaluate our approach, we utilize a publicly accessible and labeled dataset for classifying videos as misinformation or not. The motivation behind exploring video captions stems from our analysis of videos metadata. Attributes such as the number of views, likes, dislikes, and comments are ineffective as videos are hard to differentiate using this information. Using caption dataset, the proposed models can classify videos among three classes (Misinformation, Debunking Misinformation, and Neutral) with 0.85 to 0.90 F1-score. To emphasize the relevance of the misinformation class, we re-formulate our classification problem as a two-class classification - Misinformation vs. others (Debunking Misinformation and Neutral). In our experiments, the proposed models can classify videos with 0.92 to 0.95 F1-score and 0.78 to 0.90 AUC ROC.

Abdul Wahid, Rajesh Sharma, Chandra Sekhara Rao Annavarapu

Scientific publications play a vital role in the career of a researcher. However, some articles become more popular than others among the research community and subsequently drive future research directions. One of the indicative signs of popular articles is the number of citations an article receives. The citation count, which is also the basis with various other metrics, such as the journal impact factor score, the $h$-index, is an essential measure for assessing a scientific paper's quality. In this work, we proposed a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based framework for estimating future research publication citations for both the short-term (1-year) and long-term (for 5-years and 10-years) duration. We have tested our proposed approach over the AMiner dataset, specifically on research articles from the computer science domain, consisting of more than 0.8 million articles.

Shakshi Sharma, Rajesh Sharma

Online Social Media (OSM) platforms such as Twitter, Facebook are extensively exploited by the users of these platforms for spreading the (mis)information to a large audience effortlessly at a rapid pace. It has been observed that the misinformation can cause panic, fear, and financial loss to society. Thus, it is important to detect and control the misinformation in such platforms before it spreads to the masses. In this work, we focus on rumors, which is one type of misinformation (other types are fake news, hoaxes, etc). One way to control the spread of the rumors is by identifying users who are possibly the rumor spreaders, that is, users who are often involved in spreading the rumors. Due to the lack of availability of rumor spreaders labeled dataset (which is an expensive task), we use publicly available PHEME dataset, which contains rumor and non-rumor tweets information, and then apply a weak supervised learning approach to transform the PHEME dataset into rumor spreaders dataset. We utilize three types of features, that is, user, text, and ego-network features, before applying various supervised learning approaches. In particular, to exploit the inherent network property in this dataset (user-user reply graph), we explore Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), a type of Graph Neural Network (GNN) technique. We compare GCN results with the other approaches: SVM, RF, and LSTM. Extensive experiments performed on the rumor spreaders dataset, where we achieve up to 0.864 value for F1-Score and 0.720 value for AUC-ROC, shows the effectiveness of our methodology for identifying possible rumor spreaders using the GCN technique.

Flavio Bertini, Rajesh Sharma, Danilo Montesi

In the last decade, Social Networks (SNs) have deeply changed many aspects of society, and one of the most widespread behaviours is the sharing of pictures. However, malicious users often exploit shared pictures to create fake profiles leading to the growth of cybercrime. Thus, keeping in mind this scenario, authorship attribution and verification through image watermarking techniques are becoming more and more important. In this paper, firstly, we investigate how 13 most popular SNs treat the uploaded pictures, in order to identify a possible implementation of image watermarking techniques by respective SNs. Secondly, on these 13 SNs, we test the robustness of several image watermarking algorithms. Finally, we verify whether a method based on the Photo-Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU) technique can be successfully used as a watermarking approach for authorship attribution and verification of pictures on SNs. The proposed method is robust enough in spite of the fact that the pictures get downgraded during the uploading process by SNs. The results of our analysis on a real dataset of 8,400 pictures show that the proposed method is more effective than other watermarking techniques and can help to address serious questions about privacy and security on SNs.

Ivan Slobozhan, Peter Ormosi, Rajesh Sharma

Using lobbying data from OpenSecrets.org, we offer several experiments applying machine learning techniques to predict if a piece of legislation (US bill) has been subjected to lobbying activities or not. We also investigate the influence of the intensity of the lobbying activity on how discernible a lobbied bill is from one that was not subject to lobbying. We compare the performance of a number of different models (logistic regression, random forest, CNN and LSTM) and text embedding representations (BOW, TF-IDF, GloVe, Law2Vec). We report results of above 0.85% ROC AUC scores, and 78% accuracy. Model performance significantly improves (95% ROC AUC, and 88% accuracy) when bills with higher lobbying intensity are looked at. We also propose a method that could be used for unlabelled data. Through this we show that there is a considerably large number of previously unlabelled US bills where our predictions suggest that some lobbying activity took place. We believe our method could potentially contribute to the enforcement of the US Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) by indicating the bills that were likely to have been affected by lobbying but were not filed as such.

Navedanjum Ansari, Rajesh Sharma

Identifying semantically identical questions on, Question and Answering social media platforms like Quora is exceptionally significant to ensure that the quality and the quantity of content are presented to users, based on the intent of the question and thus enriching overall user experience. Detecting duplicate questions is a challenging problem because natural language is very expressive, and a unique intent can be conveyed using different words, phrases, and sentence structuring. Machine learning and deep learning methods are known to have accomplished superior results over traditional natural language processing techniques in identifying similar texts. In this paper, taking Quora for our case study, we explored and applied different machine learning and deep learning techniques on the task of identifying duplicate questions on Quora's dataset. By using feature engineering, feature importance techniques, and experimenting with seven selected machine learning classifiers, we demonstrated that our models outperformed previous studies on this task. Xgboost model with character level term frequency and inverse term frequency is our best machine learning model that has also outperformed a few of the Deep learning baseline models. We applied deep learning techniques to model four different deep neural networks of multiple layers consisting of Glove embeddings, Long Short Term Memory, Convolution, Max pooling, Dense, Batch Normalization, Activation functions, and model merge. Our deep learning models achieved better accuracy than machine learning models. Three out of four proposed architectures outperformed the accuracy from previous machine learning and deep learning research work, two out of four models outperformed accuracy from previous deep learning study on Quora's question pair dataset, and our best model achieved accuracy of 85.82% which is close to Quora state of the art accuracy.

Rajesh Sharma, Deepak Subramanian, Satish N. Srirama

The digitization of the medical data has been a sensitive topic. In modern times laws such as the HIPAA provide some guidelines for electronic transactions in medical data to prevent attacks and fraudulent usage of private information. In our paper, we explore an architecture that uses hybrid computing with decentralized key management and show how it is suitable in preventing a special form of re-identification attack that we name as the re-assembly attack. This architecture would be able to use current infrastructure from mobile phones to server certificates and cloud based decentralized storage models in an efficient way to provide a reliable model for communication of medical data. We encompass entities including patients, doctors, insurance agents, emergency contacts, researchers, medical test laboratories and technicians. This is a complete architecture that provides patients with a good level of privacy, secure communication and more direct control.