Autumn Toney

Autumn Toney

This work presents a large-scale analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) references within news articles and scientific publications between 2011 and 2019. We implement word association measurements that automatically identify shifts in language co-occurring with AI/ML and quantify the strength of these word associations. Our results highlight the evolution of perceptions and definitions around AI/ML and detect emerging application areas, models, and systems (e.g., blockchain and cybersecurity). Recent small-scale, manual studies have explored AI/ML discourse within the general public, the policymaker community, and researcher community, but are limited in their scalability and longevity. Our methods provide new views into public perceptions and subject-area expert discussions of AI/ML and greatly exceed the explanative power of prior work.

Autumn Toney, Akshat Pandey, Wei Guo et al.

This paper considers the problem of automatically characterizing overall attitudes and biases that may be associated with emerging information operations via artificial intelligence. Accurate analysis of these emerging topics usually requires laborious, manual analysis by experts to annotate millions of tweets to identify biases in new topics. We introduce extensions of the Word Embedding Association Test from Caliskan et al. to a new domain (Caliskan, 2017). Our practical and unsupervised method is used to quantify biases promoted in information operations. We validate our method using known information operation-related tweets from Twitter's Transparency Report. We perform a case study on the COVID-19 pandemic to evaluate our method's performance on non-labeled Twitter data, demonstrating its usability in emerging domains.