TY - GEN
T1 - Detecting troll tweets in a bilingual corpus
AU - Miao, Lin
AU - Last, Mark
AU - Litvak, Marina
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC
PY - 2020/1/1
Y1 - 2020/1/1
N2 - During the past several years, a large amount of troll accounts has emerged with efforts to manipulate public opinion on social network sites. They are often involved in spreading misinformation, fake news, and propaganda with the intent of distracting and sowing discord. This paper aims to detect troll tweets in both English and Russian assuming that the tweets are generated by some “troll farm." We reduce this task to the authorship verification problem of determining whether a single tweet is authored by a “troll farm" account or not. We evaluate a supervised classification approach with monolingual, cross-lingual, and bilingual training scenarios, using several machine learning algorithms, including deep learning. The best results are attained by the bilingual learning, showing the area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.875 and 0.828, for tweet classification in English and Russian test sets, respectively. It is noteworthy that these results are obtained using only raw text features, which do not require manual feature engineering efforts. In this paper, we introduce a resource of English and Russian troll tweets containing original tweets and translation from English to Russian, Russian to English. It is available for academic purposes.
AB - During the past several years, a large amount of troll accounts has emerged with efforts to manipulate public opinion on social network sites. They are often involved in spreading misinformation, fake news, and propaganda with the intent of distracting and sowing discord. This paper aims to detect troll tweets in both English and Russian assuming that the tweets are generated by some “troll farm." We reduce this task to the authorship verification problem of determining whether a single tweet is authored by a “troll farm" account or not. We evaluate a supervised classification approach with monolingual, cross-lingual, and bilingual training scenarios, using several machine learning algorithms, including deep learning. The best results are attained by the bilingual learning, showing the area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.875 and 0.828, for tweet classification in English and Russian test sets, respectively. It is noteworthy that these results are obtained using only raw text features, which do not require manual feature engineering efforts. In this paper, we introduce a resource of English and Russian troll tweets containing original tweets and translation from English to Russian, Russian to English. It is available for academic purposes.
KW - Authorship Verification
KW - Bilingual Training
KW - Natural Language Processing
KW - Social Network Analysis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096519508&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85096519508
T3 - LREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings
SP - 6247
EP - 6254
BT - LREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings
A2 - Calzolari, Nicoletta
A2 - Bechet, Frederic
A2 - Blache, Philippe
A2 - Choukri, Khalid
A2 - Cieri, Christopher
A2 - Declerck, Thierry
A2 - Goggi, Sara
A2 - Isahara, Hitoshi
A2 - Maegaard, Bente
A2 - Mariani, Joseph
A2 - Mazo, Helene
A2 - Moreno, Asuncion
A2 - Odijk, Jan
A2 - Piperidis, Stelios
PB - European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
T2 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020
Y2 - 11 May 2020 through 16 May 2020
ER -