arXiv subjects

Atanas Atanasov

Publications and source records attributed to Atanas Atanasov.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2020

Predicting the Topical Stance of Media and Popular Twitter Users

Discovering the stances of media outlets and influential people on current, debatable topics is important for social statisticians and policy makers. Many supervised solutions exist for determining viewpoints, but manually annotating training data is costly. In this paper, we propose a cascaded method that uses unsupervised learning to ascertain the stance of Twitter users with respect to a polarizing topic by leveraging their retweet behavior; then, it uses supervised learning based on user labels to characterize both the general political leaning of online media and of popular Twitter users, as well as their stance with respect to the target polarizing topic. We evaluate the model by comparing its predictions to gold labels from the Media Bias/Fact Check website, achieving 82.6% accuracy.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Predicting the Role of Political Trolls in Social Media

We investigate the political roles of "Internet trolls" in social media. Political trolls, such as the ones linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have recently gained enormous attention for their ability to sway public opinion and even influence elections. Analysis of the online traces of trolls has shown different behavioral patterns, which target different slices of the population. However, this analysis is manual and labor-intensive, thus making it impractical as a first-response tool for newly-discovered troll farms. In this paper, we show how to automate this analysis by using machine learning in a realistic setting. In particular, we show how to classify trolls according to their political role ---left, news feed, right--- by using features extracted from social media, i.e., Twitter, in two scenarios: (i) in a traditional supervised learning scenario, where labels for trolls are available, and (ii) in a distant supervision scenario, where labels for trolls are not available, and we rely on more-commonly-available labels for news outlets mentioned by the trolls. Technically, we leverage the community structure and the text of the messages in the online social network of trolls represented as a graph, from which we extract several types of learned representations, i.e.,~embeddings, for the trolls. Experiments on the "IRA Russian Troll" dataset show that our methodology improves over the state-of-the-art in the first scenario, while providing a compelling case for the second scenario, which has not been explored in the literature thus far.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Recursive Style Breach Detection with Multifaceted Ensemble Learning

We present a supervised approach for style change detection, which aims at predicting whether there are changes in the style in a given text document, as well as at finding the exact positions where such changes occur. In particular, we combine a TF.IDF representation of the document with features specifically engineered for the task, and we make predictions via an ensemble of diverse classifiers including SVM, Random Forest, AdaBoost, MLP, and LightGBM. Whenever the model detects that style change is present, we apply it recursively, looking to find the specific positions of the change. Our approach powered the winning system for the PAN@CLEF 2018 task on Style Change Detection.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Resolving Gendered Ambiguous Pronouns with BERT

Pronoun resolution is part of coreference resolution, the task of pairing an expression to its referring entity. This is an important task for natural language understanding and a necessary component of machine translation systems, chat bots and assistants. Neural machine learning systems perform far from ideally in this task, reaching as low as 73% F1 scores on modern benchmark datasets. Moreover, they tend to perform better for masculine pronouns than for feminine ones. Thus, the problem is both challenging and important for NLP researchers and practitioners. In this project, we describe our BERT-based approach to solving the problem of gender-balanced pronoun resolution. We are able to reach 92% F1 score and a much lower gender bias on the benchmark dataset shared by Google AI Language team.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Deploying AI Frameworks on Secure HPC Systems with Containers

The increasing interest in the usage of Artificial Intelligence techniques (AI) from the research community and industry to tackle "real world" problems, requires High Performance Computing (HPC) resources to efficiently compute and scale complex algorithms across thousands of nodes. Unfortunately, typical data scientists are not familiar with the unique requirements and characteristics of HPC environments. They usually develop their applications with high-level scripting languages or frameworks such as TensorFlow and the installation process often requires connection to external systems to download open source software during the build. HPC environments, on the other hand, are often based on closed source applications that incorporate parallel and distributed computing API's such as MPI and OpenMP, while users have restricted administrator privileges, and face security restrictions such as not allowing access to external systems. In this paper we discuss the issues associated with the deployment of AI frameworks in a secure HPC environment and how we successfully deploy AI frameworks on SuperMUC-NG with Charliecloud.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2018

Computational steering of complex flow simulations

Computational Steering, the combination of a simulation back-end with a visualisation front-end, offers great possibilities to exploit and optimise scenarios in engineering applications. Due to its interactivity, it requires fast grid generation, simulation, and visualisation and, therefore, mostly has to rely on coarse and inaccurate simulations typically performed on rather small interactive computing facilities and not on much more powerful high-performance computing architectures operated in batch-mode. This paper presents a steering environment that intends to bring these two worlds - the interactive and the classical HPC world - together in an integrated way. The environment consists of efficient fluid dynamics simulation codes and a steering and visualisation framework providing a user interface, communication methods for distributed steering, and parallel visualisation tools. The gap between steering and HPC is bridged by a hierarchical approach that performs fast interactive simulations for many scenario variants increasing the accuracy via hierarchical refinements in dependence of the time the user wants to wait. Finally, the user can trigger large simulations for selected setups on an HPC architecture exploiting the pre-computations already done on the interactive system.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2016

Interpolation for normal bundles of general curves

Given n general points p_1, p_2,..., p_n in P^r, it is natural to ask when there exists a curve C \subset P^r, of degree d and genus g, passing through p_1, p_2,..., p_n. In this paper, we give a complete answer to this question for curves C with nonspecial hyperplane section. This result is a consequence of our main theorem, which states that the normal bundle N_C of a general nonspecial curve of degree d and genus g in P^r (with d >= g + r) has the property of interpolation (i.e. that for a general effective divisor D of any degree on C, either H^0(N_C(-D)) = 0 or H^1(N_C(-D)) = 0), with exactly three exceptions.

math.AG↗

arXiv2015

Interpolation and vector bundles on curves

We define several notions of interpolation for vector bundles on curves and discuss their relation to slope stability. The heart of the paper demonstrates how to use degeneration arguments to prove interpolation. We use these ideas to show that a general connected space curve of degree $d$ and genus $g$ satisfies interpolation for $d \geq g+3$ unless $d = 5$ and $g = 2$. As a second application, we show that a general elliptic curve of degree $d$ in $\mathbb{P}^n$ satisfies weak interpolation when $d \geq 7$, $d \geq n+1$, and the remainder of $2d$ modulo $n-1$ lies between $3$ and $n-2$ inclusive. Finally, we prove that interpolation is equivalent to the---a priori stricter---notion of strong interpolation. This is useful if we are interested in incidence conditions given by higher dimensional linear spaces.

math.AG↗

arXiv2014

Nudged Elastic Band in Topological Data Analysis

We use the nudged elastic band method from computational chemistry to analyze high-dimensional data. Our approach is inspired by Morse theory, and as output we produce an increasing sequence of small cell complexes modeling the dense regions of the data. We test the method on data sets arising in social networks and in image processing. Furthermore, we apply the method to identify new topological structure in a data set of optical flow patches.

math.GN↗

arXiv2009

Resolving toric varieties with Nash blow-ups

It is a long-standing question whether an arbitrary variety is desingularized by finitely many normalized Nash blow-ups. We consider this question in the case of a toric variety. We interpret the normalized Nash blow-up in polyhedral terms, show how continued fractions can be used to give an affirmative answer for a toric surface, and report on a computer investigation in which over a thousand 3- and 4-dimensional toric varieties were successfully resolved.

math.AG↗