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Kellin Pelrine

kellin.pelrine@mila.quebec
Doctorat - McGill University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e
Reihaneh Rabbany
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Publications

Online Partisan Polarization of COVID-19
Zachary Yang
Anne Imouza
Kellin Pelrine
Sacha Lévy
Jiewen Liu
Gabrielle Desrosiers-Brisebois
Jean-François Godbout
André Blais
Reihaneh Rabbany
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.
2021-12-01
2021 International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW) (publié)
doi.org
The Surprising Performance of Simple Baselines for Misinformation Detection
Kellin Pelrine
Jacob Danovitch
Reihaneh Rabbany
As social media becomes increasingly prominent in our day to day lives, it is increasingly important to detect informative content and preve… (voir plus)nt the spread of disinformation and unverified rumours. While many sophisticated and successful models have been proposed in the literature, they are often compared with older NLP baselines such as SVMs, CNNs, and LSTMs. In this paper, we examine the performance of a broad set of modern transformer-based language models and show that with basic fine-tuning, these models are competitive with and can even significantly outperform recently proposed state-of-the-art methods. We present our framework as a baseline for creating and evaluating new methods for misinformation detection. We further study a comprehensive set of benchmark datasets, and discuss potential data leakage and the need for careful design of the experiments and understanding of datasets to account for confounding variables. As an extreme case example, we show that classifying only based on the first three digits of tweet ids, which contain information on the date, gives state-of-the-art performance on a commonly used benchmark dataset for fake news detection –Twitter16. We provide a simple tool to detect this problem and suggest steps to mitigate it in future datasets.
2021-06-03
Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021 (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
ComplexDataLab at W-NUT 2020 Task 2: Detecting Informative COVID-19 Tweets by Attending over Linked Documents
Kellin Pelrine
Jacob Danovitch
Albert Orozco Camacho
Reihaneh Rabbany
Given the global scale of COVID-19 and the flood of social media content related to it, how can we find informative discussions? We present … (voir plus)Gapformer, which effectively classifies content as informative or not. It reformulates the problem as graph classification, drawing on not only the tweet but connected webpages and entities. We leverage a pre-trained language model as well as the connections between nodes to learn a pooled representation for each document network. We show it outperforms several competitive baselines and present ablation studies supporting the benefit of the linked information. Code is available on Github.
2020-11-01
WNUT (publié)
doi.org