arXiv subjects

Iknoor Singh

Publications and source records attributed to Iknoor Singh.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

GateNLP at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Hierarchical Three-Step Prompting for Multilingual Narrative Classification

The proliferation of online news and the increasing spread of misinformation necessitate robust methods for automatic data analysis. Narrative classification is emerging as a important task, since identifying what is being said online is critical for fact-checkers, policy markers and other professionals working on information studies. This paper presents our approach to SemEval 2025 Task 10 Subtask 2, which aims to classify news articles into a pre-defined two-level taxonomy of main narratives and sub-narratives across multiple languages. We propose Hierarchical Three-Step Prompting (H3Prompt) for multilingual narrative classification. Our methodology follows a three-step Large Language Model (LLM) prompting strategy, where the model first categorises an article into one of two domains (Ukraine-Russia War or Climate Change), then identifies the most relevant main narratives, and finally assigns sub-narratives. Our approach secured the top position on the English test set among 28 competing teams worldwide. The code is available at https://github.com/GateNLP/H3Prompt.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Breaking Language Barriers with MMTweets: Advancing Cross-Lingual Debunked Narrative Retrieval for Fact-Checking

Finding previously debunked narratives involves identifying claims that have already undergone fact-checking. The issue intensifies when similar false claims persist in multiple languages, despite the availability of debunks for several months in another language. Hence, automatically finding debunks (or fact-checks) in multiple languages is crucial to make the best use of scarce fact-checkers' resources. Mainly due to the lack of readily available data, this is an understudied problem, particularly when considering the cross-lingual scenario, i.e. the retrieval of debunks in a language different from the language of the online post being checked. This study introduces cross-lingual debunked narrative retrieval and addresses this research gap by: (i) creating Multilingual Misinformation Tweets (MMTweets): a dataset that stands out, featuring cross-lingual pairs, images, human annotations, and fine-grained labels, making it a comprehensive resource compared to its counterparts; (ii) conducting an extensive experiment to benchmark state-of-the-art cross-lingual retrieval models and introducing multistage retrieval methods tailored for the task; and (iii) comprehensively evaluating retrieval models for their cross-lingual and cross-dataset transfer capabilities within MMTweets, and conducting a retrieval latency analysis. We find that MMTweets presents challenges for cross-lingual debunked narrative retrieval, highlighting areas for improvement in retrieval models. Nonetheless, the study provides valuable insights for creating MMTweets datasets and optimising debunked narrative retrieval models to empower fact-checking endeavours. The dataset and annotation codebook are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10637161.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

The False COVID-19 Narratives That Keep Being Debunked: A Spatiotemporal Analysis

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global infodemic that has brought unprecedented challenges for citizens, media, and fact-checkers worldwide. To address this challenge, over a hundred fact-checking initiatives worldwide have been monitoring the information space in their countries and publishing regular debunks of viral false COVID-19 narratives. This study examines the database of the CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, which contains 10,381 debunks related to COVID-19 published in multiple languages by different fact-checking organisations. Our spatiotemporal analysis reveals that similar or nearly duplicate false COVID-19 narratives have been spreading in multiple modalities and on various social media platforms in different countries, sometimes as much as several months after the first debunk of that narrative has been published by an International Fact-checking Network (IFCN) fact-checker. We also find that misinformation involving general medical advice has spread across multiple countries and hence has the highest proportion of false COVID-19 narratives that keep being debunked. Furthermore, as manual fact-checking is an onerous task in itself, therefore the need to repeatedly debunk the same narrative in different countries is leading, over time, to a significant waste of fact-checker resources. To this end, we propose the idea of including a multilingual debunk search tool in the fact-checking pipeline, in addition to recommending strongly that social media platforms need to adopt the same technology at scale, so as to make the best use of scarce fact-checker resources.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

A Large-Scale Comparative Study of Accurate COVID-19 Information versus Misinformation

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an infodemic where an overwhelming amount of COVID-19 related content was being disseminated at high velocity through social media. This made it challenging for citizens to differentiate between accurate and inaccurate information about COVID-19. This motivated us to carry out a comparative study of the characteristics of COVID-19 misinformation versus those of accurate COVID-19 information through a large-scale computational analysis of over 242 million tweets. The study makes comparisons alongside four key aspects: 1) the distribution of topics, 2) the live status of tweets, 3) language analysis and 4) the spreading power over time. An added contribution of this study is the creation of a COVID-19 misinformation classification dataset. Finally, we demonstrate that this new dataset helps improve misinformation classification by more than 9\% based on average F1 measure.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Comparative Analysis of Engagement, Themes, and Causality of Ukraine-Related Debunks and Disinformation

This paper compares quantitatively the spread of Ukraine-related disinformation and its corresponding debunks, first by considering re-tweets, replies, and favourites, which demonstrate that despite platform efforts Ukraine-related disinformation is still spreading wider than its debunks. Next, bidirectional post-hoc analysis is carried out using Granger causality tests, impulse response analysis and forecast error variance decomposition, which demonstrate that the spread of debunks has a positive impact on reducing Ukraine-related disinformation eventually, albeit not instantly. Lastly, the paper investigates the dominant themes in Ukraine-related disinformation and their spatiotemporal distribution. With respect to debunks, we also establish that around 18% of fact-checks are debunking claims which have already been fact-checked in another language. The latter finding highlights an opportunity for better collaboration between fact-checkers, so they can benefit from and amplify each other's debunks through translation, citation, and early publication online.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

GateNLP-UShef at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Entity-Enriched Siamese Transformer for Multilingual News Article Similarity

This paper describes the second-placed system on the leaderboard of SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. We propose an entity-enriched Siamese Transformer which computes news article similarity based on different sub-dimensions, such as the shared narrative, entities, location and time of the event discussed in the news article. Our system exploits a Siamese network architecture using a Transformer encoder to learn document-level representations for the purpose of capturing the narrative together with the auxiliary entity-based features extracted from the news articles. The intuition behind using all these features together is to capture the similarity between news articles at different granularity levels and to assess the extent to which different news outlets write about "the same events". Our experimental results and detailed ablation study demonstrate the effectiveness and the validity of our proposed method.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Multistage BiCross encoder for multilingual access to COVID-19 health information

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a rapidly growing 'infodemic' of health information online. This has motivated the need for accurate semantic search and retrieval of reliable COVID-19 information across millions of documents, in multiple languages. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel high precision and high recall neural Multistage BiCross encoder approach. It is a sequential three-stage ranking pipeline which uses the Okapi BM25 retrieval algorithm and transformer-based bi-encoder and cross-encoder to effectively rank the documents with respect to the given query. We present experimental results from our participation in the Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) shared task on COVID-19 multilingual semantic search. The independently evaluated MLIA results validate our approach and demonstrate that it outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches according to nearly all evaluation metrics in cases of both monolingual and bilingual runs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Classification Aware Neural Topic Model and its Application on a New COVID-19 Disinformation Corpus

The explosion of disinformation accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic has overloaded fact-checkers and media worldwide, and brought a new major challenge to government responses worldwide. Not only is disinformation creating confusion about medical science amongst citizens, but it is also amplifying distrust in policy makers and governments. To help tackle this, we developed computational methods to categorise COVID-19 disinformation. The COVID-19 disinformation categories could be used for a) focusing fact-checking efforts on the most damaging kinds of COVID-19 disinformation; b) guiding policy makers who are trying to deliver effective public health messages and counter effectively COVID-19 disinformation. This paper presents: 1) a corpus containing what is currently the largest available set of manually annotated COVID-19 disinformation categories; 2) a classification-aware neural topic model (CANTM) designed for COVID-19 disinformation category classification and topic discovery; 3) an extensive analysis of COVID-19 disinformation categories with respect to time, volume, false type, media type and origin source.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

On the Coherence of Fake News Articles

The generation and spread of fake news within new and online media sources is emerging as a phenomenon of high societal significance. Combating them using data-driven analytics has been attracting much recent scholarly interest. In this study, we analyze the textual coherence of fake news articles vis-a-vis legitimate ones. We develop three computational formulations of textual coherence drawing upon the state-of-the-art methods in natural language processing and data science. Two real-world datasets from widely different domains which have fake/legitimate article labellings are then analyzed with respect to textual coherence. We observe apparent differences in textual coherence across fake and legitimate news articles, with fake news articles consistently scoring lower on coherence as compared to legitimate news ones. While the relative coherence shortfall of fake news articles as compared to legitimate ones form the main observation from our study, we analyze several aspects of the differences and outline potential avenues of further inquiry.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Real-Time Monitoring of Area Angles with Synchrophasor Measurements

This paper develops a comprehensive framework of Area Angle Monitoring (AAM) to monitor the stress of bulk power transfer across an area of a power transmission system in real-time. Area angle is calculated from synchrophasor measurements to provide alert to system operators if the area angle exceeds pre-defined thresholds. This paper proposes general methods to identify these warning and emergency thresholds, and tests a mitigation strategy to relieve the area stress when the area angle exceeds the threshold. In order to handle the limited coverage of synchrophasor measurements, this paper proposes methods to estimate phase angles for boundary buses without synchrophasor measurements, which extends the application of AAM. AAM is verified for a power transmission area in the Western Electricity Coordinating Council system with both simulated data and synchrophasor measurements recorded from real events. A utility deployment to test the framework for monitoring area angle with live-stream and recorded synchrophasor data is described.

math.DS↗