No Arabic abstract
In this paper we present a novel interactive multimodal learning system, which facilitates search and exploration in large networks of social multimedia users. It allows the analyst to identify and select users of interest, and to find similar users in an interactive learning setting. Our approach is based on novel multimodal representations of users, words and concepts, which we simultaneously learn by deploying a general-purpose neural embedding model. We show these representations to be useful not only for categorizing users, but also for automatically generating user and community profiles. Inspired by traditional summarization approaches, we create the profiles by selecting diverse and representative content from all available modalities, i.e. the text, image and user modality. The usefulness of the approach is evaluated using artificial actors, which simulate user behavior in a relevance feedback scenario. Multiple experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the quality of our multimodal representations, to compare different embedding strategies, and to determine the importance of different modalities. We demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach on two different multimedia collections originating from the violent online extremism forum Stormfront and the microblogging platform Twitter, which are particularly interesting due to the high semantic level of the discussions they feature.
There has been an explosion of multimodal content generated on social media networks in the last few years, which has necessitated a deeper understanding of social media content and user behavior. We present a novel content-independent content-user-reaction model for social multimedia content analysis. Compared to prior works that generally tackle semantic content understanding and user behavior modeling in isolation, we propose a generalized solution to these problems within a unified framework. We embed users, images and text drawn from open social media in a common multimodal geometric space, using a novel loss function designed to cope with distant and disparate modalities, and thereby enable seamless three-way retrieval. Our model not only outperforms unimodal embedding based methods on cross-modal retrieval tasks but also shows improvements stemming from jointly solving the two tasks on Twitter data. We also show that the user embeddings learned within our joint multimodal embedding model are better at predicting user interests compared to those learned with unimodal content on Instagram data. Our framework thus goes beyond the prior practice of using explicit leader-follower link information to establish affiliations by extracting implicit content-centric affiliations from isolated users. We provide qualitative results to show that the user clusters emerging from learned embeddings have consistent semantics and the ability of our model to discover fine-grained semantics from noisy and unstructured data. Our work reveals that social multimodal content is inherently multimodal and possesses a consistent structure because in social networks meaning is created through interactions between users and content.
Many geoportals such as ArcGIS Online are established with the goal of improving geospatial data reusability and achieving intelligent knowledge discovery. However, according to previous research, most of the existing geoportals adopt Lucene-based techniques to achieve their core search functionality, which has a limited ability to capture the users search intentions. To better understand a users search intention, query expansion can be used to enrich the users query by adding semantically similar terms. In the context of geoportals and geographic information retrieval, we advocate the idea of semantically enriching a users query from both geospatial and thematic perspectives. In the geospatial aspect, we propose to enrich a query by using both place partonomy and distance decay. In terms of the thematic aspect, concept expansion and embedding-based document similarity are used to infer the implicit information hidden in a users query. This semantic query expansion 1 2 G. Mai et al. framework is implemented as a semantically-enriched search engine using ArcGIS Online as a case study. A benchmark dataset is constructed to evaluate the proposed framework. Our evaluation results show that the proposed semantic query expansion framework is very effective in capturing a users search intention and significantly outperforms a well-established baseline-Lucenes practical scoring function-with more than 3.0 increments in DCG@K (K=3,5,10).
Social learning, i.e., students learning from each other through social interactions, has the potential to significantly scale up instruction in online education. In many cases, such as in massive open online courses (MOOCs), social learning is facilitated through discussion forums hosted by course providers. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic model for the process of learners posting on such forums, using point processes. Different from existing works, our method integrates topic modeling of the post text, timescale modeling of the decay in post activity over time, and learner topic interest modeling into a single model, and infers this information from user data. Our method also varies the excitation levels induced by posts according to the thread structure, to reflect typical notification settings in discussion forums. We experimentally validate the proposed model on three real-world MOOC datasets, with the largest one containing up to 6,000 learners making 40,000 posts in 5,000 threads. Results show that our model excels at thread recommendation, achieving significant improvement over a number of baselines, thus showing promise of being able to direct learners to threads that they are interested in more efficiently. Moreover, we demonstrate analytics that our model parameters can provide, such as the timescales of different topic categories in a course.
Hateful and offensive content detection has been extensively explored in a single modality such as text. However, such toxic information could also be communicated via multimodal content such as online memes. Therefore, detecting multimodal hateful content has recently garnered much attention in academic and industry research communities. This paper aims to contribute to this emerging research topic by proposing DisMultiHate, which is a novel framework that performed the classification of multimodal hateful content. Specifically, DisMultiHate is designed to disentangle target entities in multimodal memes to improve hateful content classification and explainability. We conduct extensive experiments on two publicly available hateful and offensive memes datasets. Our experiment results show that DisMultiHate is able to outperform state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal baselines in the hateful meme classification task. Empirical case studies were also conducted to demonstrate DisMultiHates ability to disentangle target entities in memes and ultimately showcase DisMultiHates explainability of the multimodal hateful content classification task.
Underground online forums are platforms that enable trades of illicit services and stolen goods. Carding forums, in particular, are known for being focused on trading financial information. However, little evidence exists about the sellers that are present on carding forums, the precise types of products they advertise, and the prices buyers pay. Existing literature mainly focuses on the organisation and structure of the forums. Furthermore, studies on carding forums are usually based on literature review, expert interviews, or data from forums that have already been shut down. This paper provides first-of-its-kind empirical evidence on active forums where stolen financial data is traded. We monitored 5 out of 25 discovered forums, collected posts from the forums over a three-month period, and analysed them quantitatively and qualitatively. We focused our analyses on products, prices, seller prolificacy, seller specialisation, and seller reputation.