Miguel Arana-Catania

Also published as: Miguel Arana-catania


2023

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PANACEA: An Automated Misinformation Detection System on COVID-19
Runcong Zhao | Miguel Arana-catania | Lixing Zhu | Elena Kochkina | Lin Gui | Arkaitz Zubiaga | Rob Procter | Maria Liakata | Yulan He
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

In this demo, we introduce a web-based misinformation detection system PANACEA on COVID-19 related claims, which has two modules, fact-checking and rumour detection. Our fact-checking module, which is supported by novel natural language inference methods with a self-attention network, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. It is also able to give automated veracity assessment and ranked supporting evidence with the stance towards the claim to be checked. In addition, PANACEA adapts the bi-directional graph convolutional networks model, which is able to detect rumours based on comment networks of related tweets, instead of relying on the knowledge base. This rumour detection module assists by warning the users in the early stages when a knowledge base may not be available.

2022

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PHEMEPlus: Enriching Social Media Rumour Verification with External Evidence
John Dougrez-Lewis | Elena Kochkina | Miguel Arana-Catania | Maria Liakata | Yulan He
Proceedings of the Fifth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)

Work on social media rumour verification utilises signals from posts, their propagation and users involved. Other lines of work target identifying and fact-checking claims based on information from Wikipedia, or trustworthy news articles without considering social media context. However works combining the information from social media with external evidence from the wider web are lacking. To facilitate research in this direction, we release a novel dataset, PHEMEPlus, an extension of the PHEME benchmark, which contains social media conversations as well as relevant external evidence for each rumour. We demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating such evidence in improving rumour verification models. Additionally, as part of the evidence collection, we evaluate various ways of query formulation to identify the most effective method.

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Natural Language Inference with Self-Attention for Veracity Assessment of Pandemic Claims
Miguel Arana-Catania | Elena Kochkina | Arkaitz Zubiaga | Maria Liakata | Robert Procter | Yulan He
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

We present a comprehensive work on automated veracity assessment from dataset creation to developing novel methods based on Natural Language Inference (NLI), focusing on misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We first describe the construction of the novel PANACEA dataset consisting of heterogeneous claims on COVID-19 and their respective information sources. The dataset construction includes work on retrieval techniques and similarity measurements to ensure a unique set of claims. We then propose novel techniques for automated veracity assessment based on Natural Language Inference including graph convolutional networks and attention based approaches. We have carried out experiments on evidence retrieval and veracity assessment on the dataset using the proposed techniques and found them competitive with SOTA methods, and provided a detailed discussion.

2021

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Evaluation of Abstractive Summarisation Models with Machine Translation in Deliberative Processes
Miguel Arana-Catania | Rob Procter | Yulan He | Maria Liakata
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization

We present work on summarising deliberative processes for non-English languages. Unlike commonly studied datasets, such as news articles, this deliberation dataset reflects difficulties of combining multiple narratives, mostly of poor grammatical quality, in a single text. We report an extensive evaluation of a wide range of abstractive summarisation models in combination with an off-the-shelf machine translation model. Texts are translated into English, summarised, and translated back to the original language. We obtain promising results regarding the fluency, consistency and relevance of the summaries produced. Our approach is easy to implement for many languages for production purposes by simply changing the translation model.