Rajesh Kumar Sharma

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.

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.

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.