Concerns have reached the mainstream about how social media are affecting political outcomes. One trajectory for this is the exposure of politicians to online abuse. In this paper we use 1.4 million tweets from the months before the 2015 and 2017 UK general elections to explore the abuse directed at politicians. This collection allows us to look at abuse broken down by both party and gender and aimed at specific Members of Parliament. It also allows us to investigate the characteristics of those who send abuse and their topics of interest. Results show that in both absolute and proportional terms, abuse increased substantially in 2017 compared with 2015. Abusive replies are somewhat less directed at women and those not in the currently governing party. Those who send the abuse may be issue-focused, or they may repeatedly target an individual. In the latter category, accounts are more likely to be throwaway. Those sending abuse have a wide range of topical triggers, including borders and terrorism.
Work exists regarding accurately identifying abusive messages automatically @cite_0 @cite_9 @cite_14 @cite_20 @cite_1 . The work of has been described as the state of the art, with precision recall of 0.63 being reported as equivalent to human performance. report a human interannotator agreement of only 0.69 in annotating racial slurs, and report a human agreement of 0.8 with a Krippendorf's alpha of 0.25 on UK data, demonstrating that the limiting factor is the complexity of the task definition. Burnap and Williams particularly focus on hate speech with regards to protected characteristics such as race, disability and sexual orientation. Waseem and Hovy also focus on hate speech, and share a gold standard UK Tweet corpus. seek to identify the problem accounts rather than the problem material. Schmidt and Wiegand provide a review of prior work and methods.
@cite_14 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_0 @cite_20
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We present an approach to detecting hate speech in online text, where hate speech is defined as abusive speech targeting specific group characteristics, such as ethnic origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. While hate speech against any group may exhibit some common characteristics, we have observed that hatred against each different group is typically characterized by the use of a small set of high frequency stereotypical words; however, such words may be used in either a positive or a negative sense, making our task similar to that of words sense disambiguation. In this paper we describe our definition of hate speech, the collection and annotation of our hate speech corpus, and a mechanism for detecting some commonly used methods of evading common "dirty word" filters. We describe pilot classification experiments in which we classify anti-semitic speech reaching an accuracy 94 , precision of 68 and recall at 60 , for an F1 measure of. 6375. Scholars are increasingly citing electronic “web references” which are not preserved in libraries or full text archives. WebCite is a new standard for citing web references. To “webcite” a document involves archiving the cited Web page through www.webcitation.org and citing the WebCite permalink instead of (or in addition to) the unstable live Web page. This journal has amended its “instructions for authors” accordingly, asking authors to archive cited Web pages before submitting a manuscript. Almost 200 other journals are already using the system. We discuss the rationale for WebCite, its technology, and how scholars, editors, and publishers can benefit from the service. Citing scholars initiate an archiving process of all cited Web references, ideally before they submit a manuscript. Authors of online documents and websites which are expected to be cited by others can ensure that their work is permanently available by creating an archived copy using WebCite and providing the citation information including the WebCite link on their Web document(s). Editors should ask their authors to cache all cited Web addresses (Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs) “prospectively” before submitting their manuscripts to their journal. Editors and publishers should also instruct their copyeditors to cache cited Web material if the author has not done so already. Finally, WebCite can process publisher submitted “citing articles” (submitted for example as eXtensible Markup Language [XML] documents) to automatically archive all cited Web pages shortly before or on publication. Finally, WebCite can act as a focussed crawler, caching retrospectively references of already published articles. Copyright issues are addressed by honouring respective Internet standards (robot exclusion files, no-cache and no-archive tags). Long-term preservation is ensured by agreements with libraries and digital preservation organizations. The resulting WebCite Index may also have applications for research assessment exercises, being able to measure the impact of Web services and published Web documents through access and Web citation metrics. @PARASPLIT [J Med Internet Res 2005;7(5):e60] A citing sentence is one that appears in a scientific article and cites previous work. Citing sentences have been studied and used in many applications. For example, they have been used in scientific paper summarization, automatic survey generation, paraphrase identification, and citation function classification. Citing sentences that cite multiple papers are common in scientific writing. This observation should be taken into consideration when using citing sentences in applications. For instance, when a citing sentence is used in a summary of a scientific paper, only the fragments of the sentence that are relevant to the summarized paper should be included in the summary. In this paper, we present and compare three different approaches for identifying the fragments of a citing sentence that are related to a given target reference. Our methods are: word classification, sequence labeling, and segment classification. Our experiments show that segment classification achieves the best results. Hate speech in the form of racist and sexist remarks are a common occurrence on social media. For that reason, many social media services address the problem of identifying hate speech, but the definition of hate speech varies markedly and is largely a manual effort (BBC, 2015; Lomas, 2015). We provide a list of criteria founded in critical race theory, and use them to annotate a publicly available corpus of more than 16k tweets. We analyze the impact of various extra-linguistic features in conjunction with character n-grams for hatespeech detection. We also present a dictionary based the most indicative words in our data. Abstract Documents in computer-readable form can be used to provide information about other documents, i.e. those they cite. To do this efficiently requires procedures for computer recognition of citing statements. This is not easy, especially for multi-sentence citing statements. Computer recognition procedures have been developed which are accurate to the following extent: 73 of the words in statements selected by computer procedures as being citing statements are words which are correctly attributable to the corresponding documents. The retrieval effectiveness of computer-recognized citing statements was tested in the following way. First, for eight retrieval requests in inorganiic chemistry, average recall by search of Chemical Abstracts Service indexing and Chemical Abstracts abstract text words was found to be 50 . Words from citing statements referring to the papers to be retrieved were then added to the index terms and abstract words as additional access points, and searching was repeated. Average recall increased to 70 . Only words from citing statements published within a year of the cited papers were used. The retrieval effect of citing statement words alone (published within a year) without index or abstract terms was the following: average recall was 40 . When just the words of the titles of the cited papers were added to those citing statement words, average recall increased to 50 . Medical researchers are legally required to protect patients' privacy by removing personally identifiable information from medical records before sharing the data with other researchers. We present an evaluation of methods for computer-assisted removal and replacement of protected health information (PHI) from free-text nursing notes collected in the intensive care unit as part of the MIMIC II project. A semiautomated method was developed to allow clinicians to highlight PHI on the screen of a tablet PC and to compare and combine the selections of different experts reading the same notes. An analysis of the performance of three human expert de-identifiers and of an automated system is presented. Expert adjudication demonstrated that inter-human variability was high, with few false positives and many false negatives. The sensitivity of human experts working alone ranged from 0.63 to 0.93, with an average of 0.81, and the average positive predictive value was 0.98. An algorithm generated few false negatives but many false positives. Its sensitivity was 0.85, but its positive predictive value was only 0.37. The de-identified database of nursing notes was re-identified with realistic surrogate (but unprotected) dates, serial numbers, names, and phrases to provide a gold standard database of over 2600 notes (approximately 340,000 words) with over 1700 instances of PHI. This reference gold standard database of nursing notes and the Java source code used to evaluate algorithm performance will be made freely available on Physionet in order to facilitate the development and validation of future de-identification algorithms. NNScore is a neural-network-based scoring function designed to aid the computational identification of small-molecule ligands. While the test cases included in the original NNScore article demonstrated the utility of the program, the application examples were limited. The purpose of the current work is to further confirm that neural-network scoring functions are effective, even when compared to the scoring functions of state-of-the-art docking programs, such as AutoDock, the most commonly cited program, and AutoDock Vina, thought to be two orders of magnitude faster. Aside from providing additional validation of the original NNScore function, we here present a second neural-network scoring function, NNScore 2.0. NNScore 2.0 considers many more binding characteristics when predicting affinity than does the original NNScore. The network output of NNScore 2.0 also differs from that of NNScore 1.0; rather than a binary classification of ligand potency, NNScore 2.0 provides a single estimate of the pKd. To fac... Abstract Objective Compare the spike detection performance of three skilled humans and three computer algorithms. Methods 40 prolonged EEGs, 35 containing reported spikes, were evaluated. Spikes and sharp waves were marked by the humans and algorithms. Pairwise sensitivity and false positive rates were calculated for each human–human and algorithm-human pair. Differences in human pairwise performance were calculated and compared to the range of algorithm versus human performance differences as a type of statistical Turing test. Results 5474 individual spike events were marked by the humans. Mean, pairwise human sensitivities and false positive rates were 40.0 , 42.1 , and 51.5 , and 0.80, 0.97, and 1.99 min. Only the Persyst 13 (P13) algorithm was comparable to humans – 43.9 and 1.65 min. Evaluation of pairwise differences in sensitivity and false positive rate demonstrated that P13 met statistical noninferiority criteria compared to the humans. Conclusion Humans had only a fair level of agreement in spike marking. The P13 algorithm was statistically noninferior to the humans. Significance This was the first time that a spike detection algorithm and humans performed similarly. The performance comparison methodology utilized here is generally applicable to problems in which skilled human performance is the desired standard and no external gold standard exists. This article challenges recent research (Evans, 2008) reporting that the concentration of cited scientific literature increases with the online availability of articles and journals. Using Thomson Reuters' Web of Science, the present article analyses changes in the concentration of citations received (2- and 5-year citation windows) by papers published between 1900 and 2005. Three measures of concentration are used: the percentage of papers that received at least one citation (cited papers); the percentage of papers needed to account for 20 , 50 , and 80 of the citations; and the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI). These measures are used for four broad disciplines: natural sciences and engineering, medical fields, social sciences, and the humanities. All these measures converge and show that, contrary to what was reported by Evans, the dispersion of citations is actually increasing. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Doxing is online abuse where a malicious party harms another by releasing identifying or sensitive information. Motivations for doxing include personal, competitive, and political reasons, and web users of all ages, genders and internet experience have been targeted. Existing research on doxing is primarily qualitative. This work improves our understanding of doxing by being the first to take a quantitative approach. We do so by designing and deploying a tool which can detect dox files and measure the frequency, content, targets, and effects of doxing on popular dox-posting sites. This work analyzes over 1.7 million text files posted to paste-bin.com, 4chan.org and 8ch.net, sites frequently used to share doxes online, over a combined period of approximately thirteen weeks. Notable findings in this work include that approximately 0.3 of shared files are doxes, that online social networking accounts mentioned in these dox files are more likely to close than typical accounts, that justice and revenge are the most often cited motivations for doxing, and that dox files target males more frequently than females. We also find that recent anti-abuse efforts by social networks have reduced how frequently these doxing victims closed or restricted their accounts after being attacked. We also propose mitigation steps, such a service that can inform people when their accounts have been shared in a dox file, or law enforcement notification tools to inform authorities when individuals are at heightened risk of abuse. The use of “Big Data” in policy and decision making is a current topic of debate. The 2013 murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich, London, UK led to an extensive public reaction on social media, providing the opportunity to study the spread of online hate speech (cyber hate) on Twitter. Human annotated Twitter data was collected in the immediate aftermath of Rigby's murder to train and test a supervised machine learning text classifier that distinguishes between hateful and or antagonistic responses with a focus on race, ethnicity, or religion; and more general responses. Classification features were derived from the content of each tweet, including grammatical dependencies between words to recognize “othering” phrases, incitement to respond with antagonistic action, and claims of well-founded or justified discrimination against social groups. The results of the classifier were optimal using a combination of probabilistic, rule-based, and spatial-based classifiers with a voted ensemble meta-classifier. We demonstrate how the results of the classifier can be robustly utilized in a statistical model used to forecast the likely spread of cyber hate in a sample of Twitter data. The applications to policy and decision making are discussed. Sarcasm is a form of speech act in which the speakers convey their message in an implicit way. The inherently ambiguous nature of sarcasm sometimes makes it hard even for humans to decide whether an utterance is sarcastic or not. Recognition of sarcasm can benefit many sentiment analysis NLP applications, such as review summarization, dialogue systems and review ranking systems. In this paper we experiment with semi-supervised sarcasm identification on two very different data sets: a collection of 5.9 million tweets collected from Twitter, and a collection of 66000 product reviews from Amazon. Using the Mechanical Turk we created a gold standard sample in which each sentence was tagged by 3 annotators, obtaining F-scores of 0.78 on the product reviews dataset and 0.83 on the Twitter dataset. We discuss the differences between the datasets and how the algorithm uses them (e.g., for the Amazon dataset the algorithm makes use of structured information). We also discuss the utility of Twitter #sarcasm hashtags for the task. A key challenge for automatic hate-speech detection on social media is the separation of hate speech from other instances of offensive language. Lexical detection methods tend to have low precision because they classify all messages containing particular terms as hate speech and previous work using supervised learning has failed to distinguish between the two categories. We used a crowd-sourced hate speech lexicon to collect tweets containing hate speech keywords. We use crowd-sourcing to label a sample of these tweets into three categories: those containing hate speech, only offensive language, and those with neither. We train a multi-class classifier to distinguish between these different categories. Close analysis of the predictions and the errors shows when we can reliably separate hate speech from other offensive language and when this differentiation is more difficult. We find that racist and homophobic tweets are more likely to be classified as hate speech but that sexist tweets are generally classified as offensive. Tweets without explicit hate keywords are also more difficult to classify. Hateful and antagonistic content published and propagated via the World Wide Web has the potential to cause harm and suffering on an individual basis, and lead to social tension and disorder beyond cyber space. Despite new legislation aimed at prosecuting those who misuse new forms of communication to post threatening, harassing, or grossly offensive language - or cyber hate - and the fact large social media companies have committed to protecting their users from harm, it goes largely unpunished due to difficulties in policing online public spaces. To support the automatic detection of cyber hate online, specifically on Twitter, we build multiple individual models to classify cyber hate for a range of protected characteristics including race, disability and sexual orientation. We use text parsing to extract typed dependencies, which represent syntactic and grammatical relationships between words, and are shown to capture ‘othering’ language - consistently improving machine classification for different types of cyber hate beyond the use of a Bag of Words and known hateful terms. Furthermore, we build a data-driven blended model of cyber hate to improve classification where more than one protected characteristic may be attacked (e.g. race and sexual orientation), contributing to the nascent study of intersectionality in hate crime. Hateful speech in Online Social Networks (OSNs) is a key challenge for companies and governments, as it impacts users and advertisers, and as several countries have strict legislation against the practice. This has motivated work on detecting and characterizing the phenomenon in tweets, social media posts and comments. However, these approaches face several shortcomings due to the noisiness of OSN data, the sparsity of the phenomenon, and the subjectivity of the definition of hate speech. This works presents a user-centric view of hate speech, paving the way for better detection methods and understanding. We collect a Twitter dataset of @math users along with up to @math tweets from their timelines with a random-walk-based crawler on the retweet graph, and select a subsample of @math to be manually annotated as hateful or not through crowdsourcing. We examine the difference between user activity patterns, the content disseminated between hateful and normal users, and network centrality measurements in the sampled graph. Our results show that hateful users have more recent account creation dates, and more statuses, and followees per day. Additionally, they favorite more tweets, tweet in shorter intervals and are more central in the retweet network, contradicting the "lone wolf" stereotype often associated with such behavior. Hateful users are more negative, more profane, and use less words associated with topics such as hate, terrorism, violence and anger. We also identify similarities between hateful normal users and their 1-neighborhood, suggesting strong homophily. Display Omitted De-identification shared task for longitudinal clinical records.Protected Health Information in records replaced with realistic surrogates.First corpus of its kind available for distribution.Used for Track 1 of the 2014 i2b2 UTHealth NLP shared task. The 2014 i2b2 UTHealth natural language processing shared task featured a track focused on the de-identification of longitudinal medical records. For this track, we de-identified a set of 1304 longitudinal medical records describing 296 patients. This corpus was de-identified under a broad interpretation of the HIPAA guidelines using double-annotation followed by arbitration, rounds of sanity checking, and proof reading. The average token-based F1 measure for the annotators compared to the gold standard was 0.927. The resulting annotations were used both to de-identify the data and to set the gold standard for the de-identification track of the 2014 i2b2 UTHealth shared task. All annotated private health information were replaced with realistic surrogates automatically and then read over and corrected manually. The resulting corpus is the first of its kind made available for de-identification research. This corpus was first used for the 2014 i2b2 UTHealth shared task, during which the systems achieved a mean F-measure of 0.872 and a maximum F-measure of 0.964 using entity-based micro-averaged evaluations. Most current approaches to characterize and detect hate speech focus on posted in Online Social Networks. They face shortcomings to collect and annotate hateful speech due to the incompleteness and noisiness of OSN text and the subjectivity of hate speech. These limitations are often aided with constraints that oversimplify the problem, such as considering only tweets containing hate-related words. In this work we partially address these issues by shifting the focus towards . We develop and employ a robust methodology to collect and annotate hateful users which does not depend directly on lexicon and where the users are annotated given their entire profile. This results in a sample of Twitter's retweet graph containing @math users, out of which @math were annotated. We also collect the users who were banned in the three months that followed the data collection. We show that hateful users differ from normal ones in terms of their activity patterns, word usage and as well as network structure. We obtain similar results comparing the neighbors of hateful vs. neighbors of normal users and also suspended users vs. active users, increasing the robustness of our analysis. We observe that hateful users are densely connected, and thus formulate the hate speech detection problem as a task of semi-supervised learning over a graph, exploiting the network of connections on Twitter. We find that a node embedding algorithm, which exploits the graph structure, outperforms content-based approaches for the detection of both hateful ( @math AUC vs @math AUC) and suspended users ( @math AUC vs @math AUC). Altogether, we present a user-centric view of hate speech, paving the way for better detection and understanding of this relevant and challenging issue. We explore the idea of creating a classifier that can be used to detect presence of hate speech in web discourses such as web forums and blogs. In this work, hate speech problem is abstracted into three main thematic areas of race, nationality and religion. The goal of our research is to create a model classifier that uses sentiment analysis techniques and in particular subjectivity detection to not only detect that a given sentence is subjective but also to identify and rate the polarity of sentiment expressions. We begin by whittling down the document size by removing objective sentences. Then, using subjectivity and semantic features related to hate speech, we create a lexicon that is employed to build a classifier for hate speech detection. Experiments with a hate corpus show significant practical application for a real-world web discourse. One of the most difficult challenges faced by non-native speakers of English is mastering the system of English articles. We trained a maximum entropy classifier to select among a an, the, or zero article for noun phrases (NPs), based on a set of features extracted from the local context of each. When the classifier was trained on 6 million NPs, its performance on published text was about 83 correct. We then used the classifier to detect article errors in the TOEFL essays of native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. These writers made such errors in about one out of every eight NPs, or almost once in every three sentences. The classifier's agreement with human annotators was 85 (kappa = 0.48) when it selected among a an, the, or zero article. Agreement was 89 (kappa = 0.56) when it made a binary (yes no) decision about whether the NP should have an article. Even with these levels of overall agreement, precision and recall in error detection were only 0.52 and 0.80, respectively. However, when the classifier was allowed to skip cases where its confidence was low, precision rose to 0.90, with 0.40 recall. Additional improvements in performance may require features that reflect general knowledge to handle phenomena such as indirect prior reference. In August 2005, the classifier was deployed as a component of Educational Testing Service's Criterion @math Online Writing Evaluation Service. The old Asian legend about the blind men and the elephant comes to mind when looking at how different authors of scientific papers describe a piece of related prior work. It turns out that different citations to the same paper often focus on different aspects of that paper and that neither provides a full description of its full set of contributions. In this article, we will describe our investigation of this phenomenon. We studied citation summaries in the context of research papers in the biomedical domain. A citation summary is the set of citing sentences for a given article and can be used as a surrogate for the actual article in a variety of scenarios. It contains information that was deemed by peers to be important. Our study shows that citation summaries overlap to some extent with the abstracts of the papers and that they also differ from them in that they focus on different aspects of these papers than do the abstracts. In addition to this, co-cited articles (which are pairs of articles cited by another article) tend to be similar. We show results based on a lexical similarity metric called cohesion to justify our claims. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.