Social media streams contain large and diverse amount of information, ranging from daily-life stories to the latest global and local events and news. Twitter, especially, allows a fast spread of events happening real time, and enables individuals and organizations to stay informed of the events happening now. Event detection from social media data poses different challenges from traditional text and is a research area that has attracted much attention in recent years. In this paper, we survey a wide range of event detection methods for Twitter data stream, helping readers understand the recent development in this area. We present the datasets available to the public. Furthermore, a few research opportunities

Millions of patent applications are submitted every year. Patent examiners spend tremendous amount of time to evaluate the quality of them for approval or denial. A system that can automatically evaluate patents and expedite the evaluation process is much needed. This kind of tool can also help the small enterprises, patent attorneys and agents in preparing their patent applications. This study proposes a model that can rate the quality of a patent by utilizing both the semantic and novelty information of the patent. We also built a dataset of more than 32,000 Chinese patents with manual ratings from professional patent examiners. Our experiments show that the proposed model outperforms other approaches.

In this paper, we present a large Chinese news article dataset with 4.4 million articles. These articles are obtained from different news channels and sources. They are labeled with multi-level topic categories, and some of them also have summaries. This is the first Chinese news dataset that has both hierarchical topic labels and article full texts. And it is also the largest Chinese news topic dataset. We describe the data collection, annotation and quality evaluation process. The basic statistics of the dataset, comparison with other datasets and benchmark experiments are also presented.

In this study, we proposed an approach to automatically generating court view from the fact description of a legal case. This is a text-to-text natural language generation problem, and it can help the automatic legal document generation. Due to the specialty of the legal domain, our model exploits the charge and law article information in the generation process, instead of utilizing just the fact description text. The BERT model is used as the encoder and a Transformer architecture is used as decoder. To smoothly integrate these two parts together, we employ two separate optimizers for the two components during the training process. The experiments on two data sets of Chinese legal cases show that our approach out-performs other methods.

Millions of trademarks were registered last year in China, and thousands of applications are submitted daily. A trademark must be unique in the category it belongs to. Therefore, each new trademark application needs to be checked against all the existing ones in its category. A trademark can be a text string (characters, words or phrases), a figure (symbol or design), or both. In this study, we focus on the textual trademark in Chinese, and propose a model for finding similar trademarks for a given one. This neural network model exploits the semantic, phonetic and visual similarities between two textual trademarks. We evaluated our model based on a dataset that were built from the real trademark application data. Our evaluation shows that the proposed model outperforms other approaches.

Twitter is a fast communication channel for gathering and spreading breaking news, and it generates a large volume of tweets for most events. Automatically creating a summary for an event is necessary and important. In this study, we explored two extractive approaches for summarizing events on Twitter. The first one exploits the semantic types of event related terms, and ranks the tweets based on the score computed from these semantic terms. The second one utilizes a graph convolutional network built from a tweet relation graph to generate tweet hidden features for tweet salience estimation. And the most salient tweets are selected as the summary of the event. Our experiments show that these two approaches outperform the compared methods.

This paper presents a new approach for automatically summarizing a social media event. It utilizes the BERT model as the encoder and a Transformer architecture as the decoder. The framework also includes an event topic prediction component, and the predicted event topic will help the decoder focus more on the specific aspects of the topic category when generating summary. To make the summary more succinct and coherent, the most important messages from an event cluster are selected by a message selection model and encoded by the BERT model. Our preliminary experiment shows that our approach outperforms the baseline methods.

In this demonstration, we present an intelligent system for business analysis and market research that can produce actionable competitive and strategic insight. It has two sub systems, a news content processing pipeline and a semantic search engine. The pipeline collects global business news and processes them to establish context, themes, topics, entities, sentiment and relationships. The semantic search system integrates all the information produced by the pipeline and provides users the semantic search and information exploration ability. This paper introduces all the components of this system.

There is massive amount of news on financial events every day. In this paper, we present a unified model for detecting, classifying and summarizing financial events. This model exploits a multi-task learning approach, in which a pre-trained BERT model is used to encode the news articles, and the encoded information are shared by event type classification, detection and summarization tasks. For event summarization, we use a Transformer structure as the decoder. In addition to the input document encoded by BERT, the decoder also utilizes the predicted event type and cluster information, so that it can focus on the specific aspects of the event when generating summary. Our experiments show that our approach outperforms other methods.

This paper describes our system for SemEval 2019 RumorEval: Determining rumor veracity and support for rumors (SemEval 2019 Task 7). This track has two tasks: Task A is to determine a user’s stance towards the source rumor, and Task B is to detect the veracity of the rumor: true, false or unverified. For stance classification, a neural network model with language features is utilized. For rumor verification, our approach exploits information from different dimensions: rumor content, source credibility, user credibility, user stance, event propagation path, etc. We use an ensemble approach in both tasks, which includes neural network models as well as the traditional classification algorithms. Our system is ranked 1st place in the rumor verification task by both the macro F1 measure and the RMSE measure.

In this study, we propose a new multi-task learning approach for rumor detection and stance classification tasks. This neural network model has a shared layer and two task specific layers. We incorporate the user credibility information into the rumor detection layer, and we also apply attention mechanism in the rumor detection process. The attended information include not only the hidden states in the rumor detection layer, but also the hidden states from the stance detection layer. The experiments on two datasets show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art rumor detection approaches.

Recently more and more personal stories about sexual harassment are shared online, mainly inspired by the \#MeToo movement. Safecity is an online forum for victims of sexual harassment to share their personal experience. Previous study applied neural network models to classify the harassment forms of the stories. To uncover patterns of sexual harassment, the extraction of the key elements and the categorization of these stories in different dimensions can be useful as well. In this study, we proposed neural network models to extract key elements including harasser, time, location and trigger words. In addition, we categorized these stories from different dimensions, such as location, time, and harassers' characteristics, including their age range, single/multiple harassers, profession, and relationship with the victims. We further demonstrated that encoding the key element information in the story categorization model can improve its performance. The proposed approaches and analysis would be helpful in automatically filing reports, raising public awareness, making preventing strategies and etc.

TweetSenti is a system for analyzing the sentiment of an entity in tweets. A sentence or tweet may contain multiple entities, and they do not always have the same sentiment polarity. Therefore, it is necessary to detect the sentiment for a specific target entity. This type of target-dependent (entity level) sentiment analysis has become attractive and has been used in many applications, but it is still a challenging task. TweetSenti employs a new approach for detecting the entity level sentiment. Our model splits a sentence into a left context and a right context according to the target entity, and it also exploits two different types of word embeddings to represent a word, the general word embedding and the sentiment specific word embedding. A hybrid neural network is used to capture both the sequence and structure information of the two sides of the target entity. The sequence information is learned by attention-based bi-directional LSTM models. The structure information is captured by multi-context CNN models. Based on this algorithm, we built a web-based application that users can interact with and analyze an entity's sentiment in Twitter at real-time.

The number of personal stories about sexual harassment shared online has increased exponentially in recent years. This is in part inspired by the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Safecity is an online forum for people who experienced or witnessed sexual harassment to share their personal experiences. It has collected >10,000 stories so far. Sexual harassment occurred in a variety of situations, and categorization of the stories and extraction of their key elements will provide great help for the related parties to understand and address sexual harassment. In this study, we manually annotated those stories with labels in the dimensions of location, time, and harassers' characteristics, and marked the key elements related to these dimensions. Furthermore, we applied natural language processing technologies with joint learning schemes to automatically categorize these stories in those dimensions and extract key elements at the same time. We also uncovered significant patterns from the categorized sexual harassment stories. We believe our annotated data set, proposed algorithms, and analysis will help people who have been harassed, authorities, researchers and other related parties in various ways, such as automatically filling reports, enlightening the public in order to prevent future harassment, and enabling more effective, faster action to be taken.

Social media platforms have been used for information and news gathering, and they are very valuable in many applications. However, they also lead to the spreading of rumors and fake news. Many efforts have been taken to detect and debunk rumors on social media by analyzing their content and social context using machine learning techniques. This paper gives an overview of the recent studies in the rumor detection field. It provides a comprehensive list of datasets used for rumor detection, and reviews the important studies based on what types of information they exploit and the approaches they take. And more importantly, we also present several new directions for future research.

In this paper, we describe Alibaba’s participating system in the semEval-2018 Task5: Counting Events and Participants in the Long Tail. We designed and implemented a pipeline system that consists of components to extract question properties and document features, document event category classifications, document retrieval and document clustering. To retrieve the majority of the relevant documents, we carefully designed our system to extract key information from each question and document pair. After retrieval, we perform further document clustering to count the number of events. The task contains 3 subtasks, on which we achieved F1 score of 78.33, 50.52, 63.59 , respectively, for document level retrieval. Our system ranks first in all the three subtasks on document level retrieval, and it also ranks first in incident-level evaluation by RSME measure in subtask 3.

Event trigger detection remains a challenging task. Most of previous studies focused on variations of model structures to extract features from the local context of the trigger words. However, few studies focused on the utilization of document level information. In this work, we studied the benefit of exploiting the document level information for event trigger detections in textual data. Two approaches of extracting document features are proposed, and the document features are integrated with the embeddings generated from the local context of the trigger word using a convolutional neural network (CNN) model. Our experiment shows that these two methods both outperform the CNN-based baseline model.

This paper describes the approach we used for SemEval-2017 Task 5: Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis on Financial Microblogs. We use three types of word embeddings in our algorithm: word embeddings learned from 200 million tweets, sentiment-specific word embeddings learned from 10 million tweets using distance supervision, and word embeddings learned from 20 million StockTwits messages. In our approach, we also take the left and right context of the target company into consideration when generating polarity prediction features. All the features generated from different word embeddings and contexts are integrated together to train our algorithm

Due to their often unexpected nature, natural and man-made disasters are difficult to monitor and detect for journalists and disaster management response teams. Journalists are increasingly relying on signals from social media to detect such stories in their early stage of development. Twitter, which features a vast network of local news outlets, is a major source of early signal for disaster detection. Journalists who work for global desks often follow these sources via Twitter's lists, but have to comb through thousands of small-scale or low-impact stories to find events that may be globally relevant. These are events that have a large scope, high impact, or potential geo-political relevance. We propose a model for automatically identifying events from local news sources that may break on a global scale within the next 24 hours. The results are promising and can be used in a predictive setting to help journalists manage their sources more effectively, or in a descriptive manner to analyze media coverage of disasters. Through the feature evaluation process, we also address the question: what makes a disaster event newsworthy on a global scale? As part of our data collection process, we have created a list of local sources of disaster/accident news on Twitter, which we have made publicly available.

This includes 10 word embedding data sets learned from about 400 million tweets and 7 billion words from general data. They can be used in tasks involving social media data, especially tweets, and other types of textual data. Users can choose different embedding sets based on their use cases; they can also easily try all of them to see which one provides the best performance for their application. More details about the training data collection, word embedding generation, preprocessing steps, and how to use them can be found from the following paper: Quanzhi Li, Sameena Shah, Xiaomo Liu, Armineh Nourbakhsh, Data Set: Word Embeddings Learned from Tweets and General Data, The 11th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-17). Montreal, Canada. May 16-18, 2017