Portrait de Zachary Yang

Zachary Yang

Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage automatique appliqué
IA appliquée
IA responsable
Traitement du langage naturel

Publications

Towards Detecting Contextual Real-Time Toxicity for In-Game Chat
Nicolas Grenon-Godbout
Real-time toxicity detection in online environments poses a significant challenge, due to the increasing prevalence of social media and gami… (voir plus)ng platforms. We introduce ToxBuster, a simple and scalable model that reliably detects toxic content in real-time for a line of chat by including chat history and metadata. ToxBuster consistently outperforms conventional toxicity models across popular multiplayer games, including Rainbow Six Siege, For Honor, and DOTA 2. We conduct an ablation study to assess the importance of each model component and explore ToxBuster's transferability across the datasets. Furthermore, we showcase ToxBuster's efficacy in post-game moderation, successfully flagging 82.1% of chat-reported players at a precision level of 90.0%. Additionally, we show how an additional 6% of unreported toxic players can be proactively moderated.
Online Partisan Polarization of COVID-19
Sacha Lévy
Gabrielle Desrosiers-Brisebois
André Blais
In today’s age of (mis)information, many people utilize various social media platforms in an attempt to shape public opinion on several im… (voir plus)portant issues, including elections and the COVID-19 pandemic. These two topics have recently become intertwined given the importance of complying with public health measures related to COVID-19 and politicians’ management of the pandemic. Motivated by this, we study the partisan polarization of COVID-19 discussions on social media. We propose and utilize a novel measure of partisan polarization to analyze more than 380 million posts from Twitter and Parler around the 2020 US presidential election. We find strong correlation between peaks in polarization and polarizing events, such as the January 6th Capitol Hill riot. We further classify each post into key COVID-19 issues of lockdown, masks, vaccines, as well as miscellaneous, to investigate both the volume and polarization on these topics and how they vary through time. Parler includes more negative discussions around lockdown and masks, as expected, but not much around vaccines. We also observe more balanced discussions on Twitter and a general disconnect between the discussions on Parler and Twitter.