prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. How is the ground truth for fake news established?
Context 1: 10pt
1 10pt
[ Characterizing Political Fake News in Twitter by its Meta-DataJulio Amador Díaz LópezAxel Oehmichen Miguel Molina-Solana( j amador, axelfrancois oehmichen11, mmolinas@imperial ac uk ) Imperial College London This article presents a preliminary approach towards characterizing political fake news on Twitter through the analysis of their meta-data  In particular, we focus on more than 1 5M tweets collected on the day of the election of Donald Trump as 45th president of the United States of America  We use the meta-data embedded within those tweets in order to look for differences between tweets containing fake news and tweets not containing them  Specifically, we perform our analysis only on tweets that went viral, by studying proxies for users' exposure to the tweets, by characterizing accounts spreading fake news, and by looking at their polarization  We found significant differences on the distribution of followers, the number of URLs on tweets, and the verification of the users 
]
Introduction
While fake news, understood as deliberately misleading pieces of information, have existed since long ago (e g  it is not unusual to receive news falsely claiming the death of a celebrity), the term reached the mainstream, particularly so in politics, during the 2016 presidential election in the United States BIBREF0   Since then, governments and corporations alike (e g  Google BIBREF1 and Facebook BIBREF2 ) have begun efforts to tackle fake news as they can affect political decisions BIBREF3   Yet, the ability to define, identify and stop fake news from spreading is limited 
Since the Obama campaign in 2008, social media has been pervasive in the political arena in the United States  Studies report that up to 62% of American adults receive their news from social media BIBREF4   The wide use of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook has facilitated the diffusion of fake news by simplifying the process of receiving content with no significant third party filtering, fact-checking or editorial judgement  Such characteristics make these platforms suitable means for sharing news that, disguised as legit ones, try to confuse readers 
Such use and their prominent rise has been confirmed by Craig Silverman, a Canadian journalist who is a prominent figure on fake news BIBREF5 : “In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlet” 
Our current research hence departs from the assumption that social media is a conduit for fake news and asks the question of whether fake news (as spam was some years ago) can be identified, modelled and eventually blocked  In order to do so, we use a sample of more that 1 5M tweets collected on November 8th 2016 —election day in the United States— with the goal of identifying features that tweets containing fake news are likely to have  As such, our paper aims to provide a preliminary characterization of fake news in Twitter by looking into meta-data embedded in tweets  Considering meta-data as a relevant factor of analysis is in line with findings reported by Morris et al  BIBREF6   We argue that understanding differences between tweets containing fake news and regular tweets will allow researchers to design mechanisms to block fake news in Twitter 
Specifically, our goals are: 1) compare the characteristics of tweets labelled as containing fake news to tweets labelled as not containing them, 2) characterize, through their meta-data, viral tweets containing fake news and the accounts from which they originated, and 3) determine the extent to which tweets containing fake news expressed polarized political views 
For our study, we used the number of retweets to single-out those that went viral within our sample  Tweets within that subset (viral tweets hereafter) are varied and relate to different topics  We consider that a tweet contains fake news if its text falls within any of the following categories described by Rubin et al  BIBREF7 (see next section for the details of such categories): serious fabrication, large-scale hoaxes, jokes taken at face value, slanted reporting of real facts and stories where the truth is contentious  The dataset BIBREF8 , manually labelled by an expert, has been publicly released and is available to researchers and interested parties 
From our results, the following main observations can be made:
Our findings resonate with similar work done on fake news such as the one from Allcot and Gentzkow BIBREF9   Therefore, even if our study is a preliminary attempt at characterizing fake news on Twitter using only their meta-data, our results provide external validity to previous research  Moreover, our work not only stresses the importance of using meta-data, but also underscores which parameters may be useful to identify fake news on Twitter 
The rest of the paper is organized as follows  The next section briefly discusses where this work is located within the literature on fake news and contextualizes the type of fake news we are studying  Then, we present our hypotheses, the data, and the methodology we follow  Finally, we present our findings, conclusions of this study, and future lines of work 
Defining Fake news
Our research is connected to different strands of academic knowledge related to the phenomenon of fake news  In relation to Computer Science, a recent survey by Conroy and colleagues BIBREF10 identifies two popular approaches to single-out fake news  On the one hand, the authors pointed to linguistic approaches consisting in using text, its linguistic characteristics and machine learning techniques to automatically flag fake news  On the other, these researchers underscored the use of network approaches, which make use of network characteristics and meta-data, to identify fake news 
With respect to social sciences, efforts from psychology, political science and sociology, have been dedicated to understand why people consume and/or believe misinformation BIBREF11 , BIBREF12 , BIBREF13 , BIBREF14   Most of these studies consistently reported that psychological biases such as priming effects and confirmation bias play an important role in people ability to discern misinformation 
In relation to the production and distribution of fake news, a recent paper in the field of Economics BIBREF9 found that most fake news sites use names that resemble those of legitimate organizations, and that sites supplying fake news tend to be short-lived  These authors also noticed that fake news items are more likely shared than legitimate articles coming from trusted sources, and they tend to exhibit a larger level of polarization 
The conceptual issue of how to define fake news is a serious and unresolved issue  As the focus of our work is not attempting to offer light on this, we will rely on work by other authors to describe what we consider as fake news  In particular, we use the categorization provided by Rubin et al  BIBREF7   The five categories they described, together with illustrative examples from our dataset, are as follows:
Research Hypotheses
Previous works on the area (presented in the section above) suggest that there may be important determinants for the adoption and diffusion of fake news  Our hypotheses builds on them and identifies three important dimensions that may help distinguishing fake news from legit information:
Taking those three dimensions into account, we propose the following hypotheses about the features that we believe can help to identify tweets containing fake news from those not containing them  They will be later tested over our collected dataset 
Exposure 
Characterization 
Polarization 
Data and Methodology
For this study, we collected publicly available tweets using Twitter's public API  Given the nature of the data, it is important to emphasize that such tweets are subject to Twitter's terms and conditions which indicate that users consent to the collection, transfer, manipulation, storage, and disclosure of data  Therefore, we do not expect ethical, legal, or social implications from the usage of the tweets  Our data was collected using search terms related to the presidential election held in the United States on November 8th 2016  Particularly, we queried Twitter's streaming API, more precisely the filter endpoint of the streaming API, using the following hashtags and user handles: #MyVote2016, #ElectionDay, #electionnight, @realDonaldTrump and @HillaryClinton  The data collection ran for just one day (Nov 8th 2016) 
One straightforward way of sharing information on Twitter is by using the retweet functionality, which enables a user to share a exact copy of a tweet with his followers  Among the reasons for retweeting, Body et al  BIBREF15 reported the will to: 1) spread tweets to a new audience, 2) to show one’s role as a listener, and 3) to agree with someone or validate the thoughts of others  As indicated, our initial interest is to characterize tweets containing fake news that went viral (as they are the most harmful ones, as they reach a wider audience), and understand how it differs from other viral tweets (that do not contain fake news)  For our study, we consider that a tweet went viral if it was retweeted more than 1000 times 
Once we have the dataset of viral tweets, we eliminated duplicates (some of the tweets were collected several times because they had several handles) and an expert manually inspected the text field within the tweets to label them as containing fake news, or not containing them (according to the characterization presented before)  This annotated dataset BIBREF8 is publicly available and can be freely reused 
Finally, we use the following fields within tweets (from the ones returned by Twitter's API) to compare their distributions and look for differences between viral tweets containing fake news and viral tweets not containing fake news:
In the following section, we provide graphical descriptions of the distribution of each of the identified attributes for the two sets of tweets (those labelled as containing fake news and those labelled as not containing them)  Where appropriate, we normalized and/or took logarithms of the data for better representation  To gain a better understanding of the significance of those differences, we use the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test with the null hypothesis that both distributions are equal 
Results
The sample collected consisted on 1 785 855 tweets published by 848 196 different users  Within our sample, we identified 1327 tweets that went viral (retweeted more than 1000 times by the 8th of November 2016) produced by 643 users  Such small subset of viral tweets were retweeted on 290 841 occasions in the observed time-window 
The 1327 `viral' tweets were manually annotated as containing fake news or not  The annotation was carried out by a single person in order to obtain a consistent annotation throughout the dataset  Out of those 1327 tweets, we identified 136 as potentially containing fake news (according to the categories previously described), and the rest were classified as `non containing fake news'  Note that the categorization is far from being perfect given the ambiguity of fake news themselves and human judgement involved in the process of categorization  Because of this, we do not claim that this dataset can be considered a ground truth 
The following results detail characteristics of these tweets along the previously mentioned dimensions  Table TABREF23 reports the actual differences (together with their associated p-values) of the distributions of viral tweets containing fake news and viral tweets not containing them for every variable considered 
Exposure
Figure FIGREF24 shows that, in contrast to other kinds of viral tweets, those containing fake news were created more recently  As such, Twitter users were exposed to fake news related to the election for a shorter period of time 
However, in terms of retweets, Figure FIGREF25 shows no apparent difference between containing fake news or not containing them  That is confirmed by the Kolmogorov-Smirnoff test, which does not discard the hypothesis that the associated distributions are equal 
In relation to the number of favourites, users that generated at least a viral tweet containing fake news appear to have, on average, less favourites than users that do not generate them  Figure FIGREF26 shows the distribution of favourites  Despite the apparent visual differences, the difference are not statistically significant 
Finally, the number of hashtags used in viral fake news appears to be larger than those in other viral tweets  Figure FIGREF27 shows the density distribution of the number of hashtags used  However, once again, we were not able to find any statistical difference between the average number of hashtags in a viral tweet and the average number of hashtags in viral fake news 
Characterization
We found that 82 users within our sample were spreading fake news (i e  they produced at least one tweet which was labelled as fake news)  Out of those, 34 had verified accounts, and the rest were unverified  From the 48 unverified accounts, 6 have been suspended by Twitter at the date of writing, 3 tried to imitate legitimate accounts of others, and 4 accounts have been already deleted  Figure FIGREF28 shows the proportion of verified accounts to unverified accounts for viral tweets (containing fake news vs  not containing fake news)  From the chart, it is clear that there is a higher chance of fake news coming from unverified accounts 
Turning to friends, accounts distributing fake news appear to have, on average, the same number of friends than those distributing tweets with no fake news  However, the density distribution of friends from the accounts (Figure FIGREF29 ) shows that there is indeed a statistically significant difference in their distributions 
If we take into consideration the number of followers, accounts generating viral tweets with fake news do have a very different distribution on this dimension, compared to those accounts generating viral tweets with no fake news (see Figure FIGREF30 )  In fact, such differences are statistically significant 
A useful representation for friends and followers is the ratio between friends/followers  Figures FIGREF31 and FIGREF32 show this representation  Notice that accounts spreading viral tweets with fake news have, on average, a larger ratio of friends/followers  The distribution of those accounts not generating fake news is more evenly distributed 
With respect to the number of mentions, Figure FIGREF33 shows that viral tweets labelled as containing fake news appear to use mentions to other users less frequently than viral tweets not containing fake news  In other words, tweets containing fake news mostly contain 1 mention, whereas other tweets tend to have two)  Such differences are statistically significant 
The analysis (Figure FIGREF34 ) of the presence of media in the tweets in our dataset shows that tweets labelled as not containing fake news appear to present more media elements than those labelled as fake news  However, the difference is not statistically significant 
On the other hand, Figure FIGREF35 shows that viral tweets containing fake news appear to include more URLs to other sites than viral tweets that do not contain fake news  In fact, the difference between the two distributions is statistically significant (assuming INLINEFORM0 ) 
Polarization
Finally, manual inspection of the text field of those viral tweets labelled as containing fake news shows that 117 of such tweets expressed support for Donald Trump, while only 8 supported Hillary Clinton  The remaining tweets contained fake news related to other topics, not expressing support for any of the candidates 
Discussion
As a summary, and constrained by our existing dataset, we made the following observations regarding differences between viral tweets labelled as containing fake news and viral tweets labelled as not containing them:
These findings (related to our initial hypothesis in Table TABREF44 ) clearly suggest that there are specific pieces of meta-data about tweets that may allow the identification of fake news  One such parameter is the time of exposure  Viral tweets containing fake news are shorter-lived than those containing other type of content  This notion seems to resonate with our findings showing that a number of accounts spreading fake news have already been deleted or suspended by Twitter by the time of writing  If one considers that researchers using different data have found similar results BIBREF9 , it appears that the lifetime of accounts, together with the age of the questioned viral content could be useful to identify fake news  In the light of this finding, accounts newly created should probably put under higher scrutiny than older ones  This in fact, would be a nice a-priori bias for a Bayesian classifier 
Accounts spreading fake news appear to have a larger proportion of friends/followers (i e  they have, on average, the same number of friends but a smaller number of followers) than those spreading viral content only  Together with the fact that, on average, tweets containing fake news have more URLs than those spreading viral content, it is possible to hypothesize that, both, the ratio of friends/followers of the account producing a viral tweet and number of URLs contained in such a tweet could be useful to single-out fake news in Twitter  Not only that, but our finding related to the number of URLs is in line with intuitions behind the incentives to create fake news commonly found in the literature BIBREF9 (in particular that of obtaining revenue through click-through advertising) 
Finally, it is interesting to notice that the content of viral fake news was highly polarized  This finding is also in line with those of Alcott et al  BIBREF9   This feature suggests that textual sentiment analysis of the content of tweets (as most researchers do), together with the above mentioned parameters from meta-data, may prove useful for identifying fake news 
Conclusions
With the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the concept of fake news has become a broadly-known phenomenon that is getting tremendous attention from governments and media companies  We have presented a preliminary study on the meta-data of a publicly available dataset of tweets that became viral during the day of the 2016 US presidential election  Our aim is to advance the understanding of which features might be characteristic of viral tweets containing fake news in comparison with viral tweets without fake news 
We believe that the only way to automatically identify those deceitful tweets (i e  containing fake news) is by actually understanding and modelling them  Only then, the automation of the processes of tagging and blocking these tweets can be successfully performed  In the same way that spam was fought, we anticipate fake news will suffer a similar evolution, with social platforms implementing tools to deal with them  With most works so far focusing on the actual content of the tweets, ours is a novel attempt from a different, but also complementary, angle 
Within the used dataset, we found there are differences around exposure, characteristics of accounts spreading fake news and the tone of the content  Those findings suggest that it is indeed possible to model and automatically detect fake news  We plan to replicate and validate our experiments in an extended sample of tweets (until 4 months after the US election), and tests the predictive power of the features we found relevant within our sample 
Author Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interest exist 
Context 2: Introduction
Since humans amass more and more generally available data in the form of unstructured text it would be very useful to teach machines to read and comprehend such data and then use this understanding to answer our questions  A significant amount of research has recently focused on answering one particular kind of questions the answer to which depends on understanding a context document  These are cloze-style questions BIBREF0 which require the reader to fill in a missing word in a sentence  An important advantage of such questions is that they can be generated automatically from a suitable text corpus which allows us to produce a practically unlimited amount of them  That opens the task to notoriously data-hungry deep-learning techniques which now seem to outperform all alternative approaches 
Two such large-scale datasets have recently been proposed by researchers from Google DeepMind and Facebook AI: the CNN/Daily Mail dataset BIBREF1 and the Children's Book Test (CBT) BIBREF2 respectively  These have attracted a lot of attention from the research community BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF12 with a new state-of-the-art model coming out every few weeks 
However if our goal is a production-level system actually capable of helping humans, we want the model to use all available resources as efficiently as possible  Given that
we believe that if the community is striving to bring the performance as far as possible, it should move its work to larger data 
This thinking goes in line with recent developments in the area of language modelling  For a long time models were being compared on several "standard" datasets with publications often presenting minuscule improvements in performance  Then the large-scale One Billion Word corpus dataset appeared BIBREF15 and it allowed Jozefowicz et al  to train much larger LSTM models BIBREF16 that almost halved the state-of-the-art perplexity on this dataset 
We think it is time to make a similar step in the area of text comprehension  Hence we are introducing the BookTest, a new dataset very similar to the Children's Book test but more than 60 times larger to enable training larger models even in the domain of text comprehension  Furthermore the methodology used to create our data can later be used to create even larger datasets when the need arises thanks to further technological progress 
We show that if we evaluate a model trained on the new dataset on the now standard Children's Book Test dataset, we see an improvement in accuracy much larger than other research groups achieved by enhancing the model architecture itself (while still using the original CBT training data)  By training on the new dataset, we reduce the prediction error by almost one third  On the named-entity version of CBT this brings the ensemble of our models to the level of human baseline as reported by Facebook BIBREF2   However in the final section we show in our own human study that there is still room for improvement on the CBT beyond the performance of our model 
Task Description
A natural way of testing a reader's comprehension of a text is to ask her a question the answer to which can be deduced from the text  Hence the task we are trying to solve consists of answering a cloze-style question, the answer to which depends on the understanding of a context document provided with the question  The model is also provided with a set of possible answers from which the correct one is to be selected  This can be formalized as follows:
The training data consist of tuples INLINEFORM0 , where INLINEFORM1 is a question, INLINEFORM2 is a document that contains the answer to question INLINEFORM3 , INLINEFORM4 is a set of possible answers and INLINEFORM5 is the ground-truth answer  Both INLINEFORM6 and INLINEFORM7 are sequences of words from vocabulary INLINEFORM8   We also assume that all possible answers are words from the vocabulary, that is INLINEFORM9   In the CBT and CNN/Daily Mail datasets it is also true that the ground-truth answer INLINEFORM10 appears in the document  This is exploited by many machine learning models BIBREF2 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF12 , however some do not explicitly depend on this property BIBREF1 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF9
Current Landscape
We will now briefly review what datasets for text comprehension have been published up to date and look at models which have been recently applied to solving the task we have just described 
Datasets
A crucial condition for applying deep-learning techniques is to have a huge amount of data available for training  For question answering this specifically means having a large number of document-question-answer triples available  While there is an unlimited amount of text available, coming up with relevant questions and the corresponding answers can be extremely labour-intensive if done by human annotators  There were efforts to provide such human-generated datasets, e g  Microsoft's MCTest BIBREF17 , however their scale is not suitable for deep learning without pre-training on other data BIBREF18 (such as using pre-trained word embedding vectors) 
Google DeepMind managed to avoid this scale issue with their way of generating document-question-answer triples automatically, closely followed by Facebook with a similar method  Let us now briefly introduce the two resulting datasets whose properties are summarized in Table TABREF8  
These two datasets BIBREF1 exploit a useful feature of online news articles – many articles include a short summarizing sentence near the top of the page  Since all information in the summary sentence is also presented in the article body, we get a nice cloze-style question about the article contents by removing a word from the short summary 
The dataset's authors also replaced all named entities in the dataset by anonymous tokens which are further shuffled for each new batch  This forces the model to rely solely on information from the context document, not being able to transfer any meaning of the named entities between documents 
This restricts the task to one specific aspect of context-dependent question answering which may be useful however it moves the task further from the real application scenario, where we would like the model to use all information available to answer questions  Furthermore Chen et al  BIBREF5 have suggested that this can make about 17% of the questions unanswerable even by humans  They also claim that more than a half of the question sentences are mere paraphrases or exact matches of a single sentence from the context document  This raises a question to what extent the dataset can test deeper understanding of the articles 
The Children's Book Test BIBREF2 uses a different source - books freely available thanks to Project Gutenberg  Since no summary is available, each example consists of a context document formed from 20 consecutive sentences from the story together with a question formed from the subsequent sentence 
The dataset comes in four flavours depending on what type of word is omitted from the question sentence  Based on human evaluation done in BIBREF2 it seems that NE and CN are more context dependent than the other two types – prepositions and verbs  Therefore we (and all of the recent publications) focus only on these two word types 
Several new datasets related to the (now almost standard) ones above emerged recently  We will now briefly present them and explain how the dataset we are introducing in this article differs from them 
The LAMBADA dataset BIBREF19 is designed to measure progress in understanding common-sense questions about short stories that can be easily answered by humans but cannot be answered by current standard machine-learning models (e g  plain LSTM language models)  This dataset is useful for measuring the gap between humans and machine learning algorithms  However, by contrast to our BookTest dataset, it will not allow us to track progress towards the performance of the baseline systems or on examples where machine learning may show super-human performance  Also LAMBADA is just a diagnostic dataset and does not provide ready-to-use question-answering training data, just a plain-text corpus which may moreover include copyrighted books making its use potentially problematic for some purposes  We are providing ready training data consisting of copyright-free books only 
The SQuAD dataset BIBREF20 based on Wikipedia and the Who-did-What dataset BIBREF21 based on Gigaword news articles are factoid question-answering datasets where a multi-word answer should be extracted from a context document  This is in contrast to the previous datasets, including CNN/DM, CBT, LAMBADA and our new dataset, which require only single-word answers  Both these datasets however provide less than 130,000 training questions, two orders of magnitude less than our dataset does 
The Story Cloze Test BIBREF22 provides a crowd-sourced corpus of 49,255 commonsense stories for training and 3,744 testing stories with right and wrong endings  Hence the dataset is again rather small  Similarly to LAMBADA, the Story Cloze Test was designed to be easily answerable by humans 
In the WikiReading BIBREF23 dataset the context document is formed from a Wikipedia article and the question-answer pair is taken from the corresponding WikiData page  For each entity (e g  Hillary Clinton), WikiData contain a number of property-value pairs (e g  place of birth: Chicago) which form the datasets's question-answer pairs  The dataset is certainly relevant to the community, however the questions are of very limited variety with only 20 properties (and hence unique questions) covering INLINEFORM0 of the dataset  Furthermore many of the frequent properties are mentioned at a set spot within the article (e g  the date of birth is almost always in brackets behind the name of a person) which may make the task easier for machines  We are trying to provide a more varied dataset 
Although there are several datasets related to task we are aiming to solve, they differ sufficiently for our dataset to bring new value to the community  Its biggest advantage is its size which can furthermore be easily upscaled without expensive human annotation  Finally while we are emphasizing the differences, models could certainly benefit from as diverse a collection of datasets as possible 
Machine Learning Models
A first major work applying deep-learning techniques to text comprehension was Hermann et al  BIBREF1   This work was followed by the application of Memory Networks to the same task BIBREF2   Later three models emerged around the same time BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 including our psr model BIBREF4   The AS Reader inspired several subsequent models that use it as a sub-component in a diverse ensemble BIBREF8 ; extend it with a hierarchical structure BIBREF6 , BIBREF24 , BIBREF7 ; compute attention over the context document for every word in the query BIBREF10 or use two-way context-query attention mechanism for every word in the context and the query BIBREF11 that is similar in its spirit to models recently proposed in different domains, e g  BIBREF25 in information retrieval  Other neural approaches to text comprehension are explored in BIBREF9 , BIBREF12  
Possible Directions for Improvements
Accuracy in any machine learning tasks can be enhanced either by improving a machine learning model or by using more in-domain training data  Current state of the art models BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 , BIBREF11 improve over AS Reader's accuracy on CBT NE and CN datasets by 1-2 percent absolute  This suggests that with current techniques there is only limited room for improvement on the algorithmic side 
The other possibility to improve performance is simply to use more training data  The importance of training data was highlighted by the frequently quoted Mercer's statement that “There is no data like more data ” The observation that having more data is often more important than having better algorithms has been frequently stressed since then BIBREF13 , BIBREF14  
As a step in the direction of exploiting the potential of more data in the domain of text comprehension, we created a new dataset called BookTest similar to, but much larger than the widely used CBT and CNN/DM datasets 
BookTest
Similarly to the CBT, our BookTest dataset is derived from books available through project Gutenberg  We used 3555 copyright-free books to extract CN examples and 10507 books for NE examples, for comparison the CBT dataset was extracted from just 108 books 
When creating our dataset we follow the same procedure as was used to create the CBT dataset BIBREF2   That is, we detect whether each sentence contains either a named entity or a common noun that already appeared in one of the preceding twenty sentences  This word is then replaced by a gap tag (XXXXX) in this sentence which is hence turned into a cloze-style question  The preceding 20 sentences are used as the context document  For common noun and named entity detection we use the Stanford POS tagger BIBREF27 and Stanford NER BIBREF28  
The training dataset consists of the original CBT NE and CN data extended with new NE and CN examples  The new BookTest dataset hence contains INLINEFORM0 training examples and INLINEFORM1 tokens 
The validation dataset consists of INLINEFORM0 NE and INLINEFORM1 CN questions  We have one test set for NE and one for CN, each containing INLINEFORM2 examples  The training, validation and test sets were generated from non-overlapping sets of books 
When generating the dataset we removed all editions of books used to create CBT validation and test sets from our training dataset  Therefore the models trained on the BookTest corpus can be evaluated on the original CBT data and they can be compared with recent text-comprehension models utilizing this dataset BIBREF2 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11  
Baselines
We will now use our psr model to evaluate the performance gain from increasing the dataset size 
AS Reader
In BIBREF4 we introduced the psr , which at the time of publication significantly outperformed all other architectures on the CNN, DM and CBT datasets  This model is built to leverage the fact that the answer is a single word from the context document  Similarly to many other models it uses attention over the document – intuitively a measure of how relevant each word is to answering the question  However while most previous models used this attention as weights to calculate a blended representation of the answer word, we simply sum the attention across all occurrences of each unique words and then simply select the word with the highest sum as the final answer  While simple, this trick seems both to improve accuracy and to speed-up training  It was adopted by many subsequent models BIBREF8 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF24  
Let us now describe the model in more detail  Figure FIGREF21 may help you in understanding the following paragraphs 
The words from the document and the question are first converted into vector embeddings using a look-up matrix INLINEFORM0   The document is then read by a bidirectional GRU network BIBREF29   A concatenation of the hidden states of the forward and backward GRUs at each word is then used as a contextual embedding of this word, intuitively representing the context in which the word is appearing  We can also understand it as representing the set of questions to which this word may be an answer 
Similarly the question is read by a bidirectional GRU but in this case only the final hidden states are concatenated to form the question embedding 
The attention over each word in the context is then calculated as the dot product of its contextual embedding with the question embedding  This attention is then normalized by the softmax function and summed across all occurrences of each answer candidate  The candidate with most accumulated attention is selected as the final answer 
For a more detailed description of the model including equations check BIBREF4   More details about the training setup and model hyperparameters can be found in the Appendix 
During our past experiments on the CNN, DM and CBT datasets BIBREF4 each unique word from the training, validation and test datasets had its row in the look-up matrix INLINEFORM0   However as we radically increased the dataset size, this would result in an extremely large number of model parameters so we decided to limit the vocabulary size to INLINEFORM1 most frequent words  For each example, each unique out-of-vocabulary word is now mapped on one of 1000 anonymous tokens which are randomly initialized and untrained  Fixing the embeddings of these anonymous tags proved to significantly improve the performance 
While mostly using the original AS Reader model, we have also tried introducing a minor tweak in some instances of the model  We tried initializing the context encoder GRU's hidden state by letting the encoder read the question first before proceeding to read the context document  Intuitively this allows the encoder to know in advance what to look for when reading over the context document 
Including models of this kind in the ensemble helped to improve the performance 
Results
Table TABREF25 shows the accuracy of the psr and other architectures on the CBT validation and test data  The last two rows show the performance of the psr trained on the BookTest dataset; all the other models have been trained on the original CBT training data 
If we take the best psr ensemble trained on CBT as a baseline, improving the model architecture as in BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , continuing to use the original CBT training data, lead to improvements of INLINEFORM0 and INLINEFORM1 absolute on named entities and common nouns respectively  By contrast, inflating the training dataset provided a boost of INLINEFORM2 while using the same model  The ensemble of our models even exceeded the human baseline provided by Facebook BIBREF2 on the Common Noun dataset 
Our model takes approximately two weeks to converge when trained on the BookTest dataset on a single Nvidia Tesla K40 GPU 
Discussion
Embracing the abundance of data may mean focusing on other aspects of system design than with smaller data  Here are some of the challenges that we need to face in this situation 
Firstly, since the amount of data is practically unlimited – we could even generate them on the fly resulting in continuous learning similar to the Never-Ending Language Learning by Carnegie Mellon University BIBREF30 – it is now the speed of training that determines how much data the model is able to see  Since more training data significantly help the model performance, focusing on speeding up the algorithm may be more important than ever before  This may for instance influence the decision whether to use regularization such as dropout which does seem to somewhat improve the model performance, however usually at a cost of slowing down training 
Thanks to its simplicity, the psr seems to be training fast - for example around seven times faster than the models proposed by Chen et al  BIBREF5   Hence the psr may be particularly suitable for training on large datasets 
The second challenge is how to generalize the performance gains from large data to a specific target domain  While there are huge amounts of natural language data in general, it may not be the case in the domain where we may want to ultimately apply our model 
Hence we are usually not facing a scenario of simply using a larger amount of the same training data, but rather extending training to a related domain of data, hoping that some of what the model learns on the new data will still help it on the original task 
This is highlighted by our observations from applying a model trained on the BookTest to Children's Book Test test data  If we move model training from joint CBT NE+CN training data to a subset of the BookTest of the same size (230k examples), we see a drop in accuracy of around 10% on the CBT test datasets 
Hence even though the Children's Book Test and BookTest datasets are almost as close as two disjoint datasets can get, the transfer is still very imperfect   Rightly choosing data to augment the in-domain training data is certainly a problem worth exploring in future work 
Our results show that given enough data the AS Reader was able to exceed the human performance on CBT CN reported by Facebook  However we hypothesized that the system is still not achieving its full potential so we decided to examine the room for improvement in our own small human study 
Human Study
After adding more data we have the performance on the CBT validation and test datasets soaring  However is there still potential for much further growth beyond the results we have observed?
We decided to explore the remaining space for improvement on the CBT by testing humans on a random subset of 50 named entity and 50 common noun validation questions that the psr ensemble could not answer correctly  These questions were answered by 10 non-native English speakers from our research laboratory, each on a disjoint subset of questions   Participants had unlimited time to answer the questions and were told that these questions were not correctly answered by a machine, providing additional motivation to prove they are better than computers  The results of the human study are summarized in Table TABREF28   They show that a majority of questions that our system could not answer so far are in fact answerable  This suggests that 1) the original human baselines might have been underestimated, however, it might also be the case that there are some examples that can be answered by machines and not by humans; 2) there is still space for improvement 
A system that would answer correctly every time when either our ensemble or human answered correctly would achieve accuracy over 92% percent on both validation and test NE datasets and over 96% on both CN datasets  Hence it still makes sense to use CBT dataset to study further improvements of text-comprehension systems 
Conclusion
Few ways of improving model performance are as solidly established as using more training data  Yet we believe this principle has been somewhat neglected by recent research in text comprehension  While there is a practically unlimited amount of data available in this field, most research was performed on unnecessarily small datasets 
As a gentle reminder to the community we have shown that simply infusing a model with more data can yield performance improvements of up to INLINEFORM0 where several attempts to improve the model architecture on the same training data have given gains of at most INLINEFORM1 compared to our best ensemble result  Yes, experiments on small datasets certainly can bring useful insights  However we believe that the community should also embrace the real-world scenario of data abundance 
The BookTest dataset we are proposing gives the reading-comprehension community an opportunity to make a step in that direction 
Training Details
The training details are similar to those in BIBREF4 however we are including them here for completeness 
To train the model we used stochastic gradient descent with the ADAM update rule BIBREF32 and learning rates of INLINEFORM0 , INLINEFORM1 and INLINEFORM2   The best learning rate in our experiments was INLINEFORM3   We minimized negative log-likelihood as the training objective 
The initial weights in the word-embedding matrix were drawn randomly uniformly from the interval INLINEFORM0   Weights in the GRU networks were initialized by random orthogonal matrices BIBREF34 and biases were initialized to zero  We also used a gradient clipping BIBREF33 threshold of 10 and batches of sizes between 32 or 256  Increasing the batch from 32 to 128 seems to significantly improve performance on the large dataset - something we did not observe on the original CBT data  Increasing the batch size much above 128 is currently difficult due to memory constraints of the GPU 
During training we randomly shuffled all examples at the beginning of each epoch  To speed up training, we always pre-fetched 10 batches worth of examples and sorted them according to document length  Hence each batch contained documents of roughly the same length 
We also did not use pre-trained word embeddings 
We did not perform any text pre-processing since the datasets were already tokenized 
During training we evaluated the model performance every 12 hours and at the end of each epoch and stopped training when the error on the 20k BookTest validation set started increasing  We explored the hyperparameter space by training 67 different models The region of the parameter space that we explored together with the parameters of the model with best validation accuracy are summarized in Table TABREF29  
Our model was implemented using Theano BIBREF31 and Blocks BIBREF35  
The ensembles were formed by simply averaging the predictions from the constituent single models  These single models were selected using the following algorithm 
We started with the best performing model according to validation performance  Then in each step we tried adding the best performing model that had not been previously tried  We kept it in the ensemble if it did improve its validation performance and discarded it otherwise  This way we gradually tried each model once  We call the resulting model a greedy ensemble  We used the INLINEFORM0 BookTest validation dataset for this procedure 
The algorithm was offered 10 models and selected 5 of them for the final ensemble 

ground_truth: Ground truth is not established in the paper

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. How does their ensemble method work?
Context 4: Introduction
Data imbalance is a common issue in a variety of NLP tasks such as tagging and machine reading comprehension  Table TABREF3 gives concrete examples: for the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task BIBREF2, BIBREF3, most tokens are backgrounds with tagging class $O$  Specifically, the number of tokens tagging class $O$ is 5 times as many as those with entity labels for the CoNLL03 dataset and 8 times for the OntoNotes5 0 dataset; Data-imbalanced issue is more severe for MRC tasks BIBREF4, BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8 with the value of negative-positive ratio being 50-200 
Data imbalance results in the following two issues: (1) the training-test discrepancy: Without balancing the labels, the learning process tends to converge to a point that strongly biases towards class with the majority label  This actually creates a discrepancy between training and test: at training time, each training instance contributes equally to the objective function while at test time, F1 score concerns more about positive examples; (2) the overwhelming effect of easy-negative examples  As pointed out by meng2019dsreg, significantly large number of negative examples also means that the number of easy-negative example is large  The huge number of easy examples tends to overwhelm the training, making the model not sufficiently learned to distinguish between positive examples and hard-negative examples  The cross-entropy objective (CE for short) or maximum likelihood (MLE) objective, which is widely adopted as the training objective for data-imbalanced NLP tasks BIBREF9, BIBREF10, BIBREF11, BIBREF12, BIBREF13, BIBREF14, BIBREF15, handles neither of the issues 
To handle the first issue, we propose to replace CE or MLE with losses based on the Sørensen–Dice coefficient BIBREF0 or Tversky index BIBREF1  The Sørensen–Dice coefficient, dice loss for short, is the harmonic mean of precision and recall  It attaches equal importance to false positives (FPs) and false negatives (FNs) and is thus more immune to data-imbalanced datasets  Tversky index extends dice loss by using a weight that trades precision and recall, which can be thought as the approximation of the $F_{\beta }$ score, and thus comes with more flexibility  Therefore, We use dice loss or Tversky index to replace CE loss to address the first issue 
Only using dice loss or Tversky index is not enough since they are unable to address the dominating influence of easy-negative examples  This is intrinsically because dice loss is actually a hard version of the F1 score  Taking the binary classification task as an example, at test time, an example will be classified as negative as long as its probability is smaller than 0 5, but training will push the value to 0 as much as possible  This gap isn't a big issue for balanced datasets, but is extremely detrimental if a big proportion of training examples are easy-negative ones: easy-negative examples can easily dominate training since their probabilities can be pushed to 0 fairly easily  Meanwhile, the model can hardly distinguish between hard-negative examples and positive ones  Inspired by the idea of focal loss BIBREF16 in computer vision, we propose a dynamic weight adjusting strategy, which associates each training example with a weight in proportion to $(1-p)$, and this weight dynamically changes as training proceeds  This strategy helps to deemphasize confident examples during training as their $p$ approaches the value of 1, makes the model attentive to hard-negative examples, and thus alleviates the dominating effect of easy-negative examples 
Combing both strategies, we observe significant performance boosts on a wide range of data imbalanced NLP tasks  Notably, we are able to achieve SOTA results on CTB5 (97 92, +1 86), CTB6 (96 57, +1 80) and UD1 4 (96 98, +2 19) for the POS task; SOTA results on CoNLL03 (93 33, +0 29), OntoNotes5 0 (92 07, +0 96)), MSRA 96 72(+0 97) and OntoNotes4 0 (84 47,+2 36) for the NER task; along with competitive results on the tasks of machine reading comprehension and paraphrase identification 
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: related work is presented in Section 2  We describe different training objectives in Section 3  Experimental results are presented in Section 4  We perform ablation studies in Section 5, followed by a brief conclusion in Section 6 
Related Work ::: Data Resample
The idea of weighting training examples has a long history  Importance sampling BIBREF17 assigns weights to different samples and changes the data distribution  Boosting algorithms such as AdaBoost BIBREF18 select harder examples to train subsequent classifiers  Similarly, hard example mining BIBREF19 downsamples the majority class and exploits the most difficult examples  Oversampling BIBREF20, BIBREF21 is used to balance the data distribution  Another line of data resampling is to dynamically control the weights of examples as training proceeds  For example, focal loss BIBREF16 used a soft weighting scheme that emphasizes harder examples during training  In self-paced learning BIBREF22, example weights are obtained through optimizing the weighted training loss which encourages learning easier examples first  At each training step, self-paced learning algorithm optimizes model parameters and example weights jointly  Other works BIBREF23, BIBREF24 adjusted the weights of different training examples based on training loss  Besides, recent work BIBREF25, BIBREF26 proposed to learn a separate network to predict sample weights 
Related Work ::: Data Imbalance Issue in Object Detection
The background-object label imbalance issue is severe and thus well studied in the field of object detection BIBREF27, BIBREF28, BIBREF29, BIBREF30, BIBREF31  The idea of hard negative mining (HNM) BIBREF30 has gained much attention recently  shrivastava2016ohem proposed the online hard example mining (OHEM) algorithm in an iterative manner that makes training progressively more difficult, and pushes the model to learn better  ssd2016liu sorted all of the negative samples based on the confidence loss and picking the training examples with the negative-positive ratio at 3:1  pang2019rcnn proposed a novel method called IoU-balanced sampling and aploss2019chen designed a ranking model to replace the conventional classification task with a average-precision loss to alleviate the class imbalance issue  The efforts made on object detection have greatly inspired us to solve the data imbalance issue in NLP 
Losses ::: Notation
For illustration purposes, we use the binary classification task to demonstrate how different losses work  The mechanism can be easily extended to multi-class classification 
Let $\lbrace x_i\rbrace $ denote a set of instances  Each $x_i$ is associated with a golden label vector $y_i = [y_{i0},y_{i1} ]$, where $y_{i1}\in \lbrace 0,1\rbrace $ and $y_{i0}\in \lbrace 0,1\rbrace $ respectively denote the positive and negative classes, and thus $y_i$ can be either $[0,1]$ or $[0,1]$  Let $p_i = [p_{i0},p_{i1} ]$ denote the probability vector, and $p_{i1}$ and $p_{i0}$ respectively denote the probability that a model assigns the positive and negative label to $x_i$ 
Losses ::: Cross Entropy Loss
The vanilla cross entropy (CE) loss is given by:
As can be seen from Eq DISPLAY_FORM8, each $x_i$ contributes equally to the final objective  Two strategies are normally used to address the the case where we wish that not all $x_i$ are treated equal: associating different classes with different weighting factor $\alpha $ or resampling the datasets  For the former, Eq DISPLAY_FORM8 is adjusted as follows:
where $\alpha _i\in [0,1]$ may be set by the inverse class frequency or treated as a hyperparameter to set by cross validation  In this work, we use $\lg (\frac{n-n_t}{n_t}+K)$ to calculate the coefficient $\alpha $, where $n_t$ is the number of samples with class $t$ and $n$ is the total number of samples in the training set  $K$ is a hyperparameter to tune  The data resampling strategy constructs a new dataset by sampling training examples from the original dataset based on human-designed criteria, e g , extract equal training samples from each class  Both strategies are equivalent to changing the data distribution and thus are of the same nature  Empirically, these two methods are not widely used due to the trickiness of selecting $\alpha $ especially for multi-class classification tasks and that inappropriate selection can easily bias towards rare classes BIBREF32 
Losses ::: Dice coefficient and Tversky index
Sørensen–Dice coefficient BIBREF0, BIBREF33, dice coefficient (DSC) for short, is a F1-oriented statistic used to gauge the similarity of two sets  Given two sets $A$ and $B$, the dice coefficient between them is given as follows:
In our case, $A$ is the set that contains of all positive examples predicted by a specific model, and $B$ is the set of all golden positive examples in the dataset  When applied to boolean data with the definition of true positive (TP), false positive (FP), and false negative (FN), it can be then written as follows:
For an individual example $x_i$, its corresponding DSC loss is given as follows:
As can be seen, for a negative example with $y_{i1}=0$, it does not contribute to the objective  For smoothing purposes, it is common to add a $\gamma $ factor to both the nominator and the denominator, making the form to be as follows:
As can be seen, negative examples, with $y_{i1}$ being 0 and DSC being $\frac{\gamma }{ p_{i1}+\gamma }$, also contribute to the training  Additionally, milletari2016v proposed to change the denominator to the square form for faster convergence, which leads to the following dice loss (DL):
Another version of DL is to directly compute set-level dice coefficient instead of the sum of individual dice coefficient  We choose the latter due to ease of optimization 
Tversky index (TI), which can be thought as the approximation of the $F_{\beta }$ score, extends dice coefficient to a more general case  Given two sets $A$ and $B$, tversky index is computed as follows:
Tversky index offers the flexibility in controlling the tradeoff between false-negatives and false-positives  It degenerates to DSC if $\alpha =\beta =0 5$  The Tversky loss (TL) for the training set $\lbrace x_i,y_i\rbrace $ is thus as follows:
Losses ::: Self-adusting Dice Loss
Consider a simple case where the dataset consists of only one example $x_i$, which is classified as positive as long as $p_{i1}$ is larger than 0 5  The computation of $F1$ score is actually as follows:
Comparing Eq DISPLAY_FORM14 with Eq DISPLAY_FORM22, we can see that Eq DISPLAY_FORM14 is actually a soft form of $F1$, using a continuous $p$ rather than the binary $\mathbb {I}( p_{i1}>0 5)$  This gap isn't a big issue for balanced datasets, but is extremely detrimental if a big proportion of training examples are easy-negative ones: easy-negative examples can easily dominate training since their probabilities can be pushed to 0 fairly easily  Meanwhile, the model can hardly distinguish between hard-negative examples and positive ones, which has a huge negative effect on the final F1 performance 
To address this issue, we propose to multiply the soft probability $p$ with a decaying factor $(1-p)$, changing Eq DISPLAY_FORM22 to the following form:
One can think $(1-p_{i1})$ as a weight associated with each example, which changes as training proceeds  The intuition of changing $p_{i1}$ to $(1-p_{i1}) p_{i1}$ is to push down the weight of easy examples  For easy examples whose probability are approaching 0 or 1, $(1-p_{i1}) p_{i1}$ makes the model attach significantly less focus to them  Figure FIGREF23 gives gives an explanation from the perspective in derivative: the derivative of $\frac{(1-p)p}{1+(1-p)p}$ with respect to $p$ approaches 0 immediately after $p$ approaches 0, which means the model attends less to examples once they are correctly classified 
A close look at Eq DISPLAY_FORM14 reveals that it actually mimics the idea of focal loss (FL for short) BIBREF16 for object detection in vision  Focal loss was proposed for one-stage object detector to handle foreground-background tradeoff encountered during training  It down-weights the loss assigned to well-classified examples by adding a $(1-p)^{\beta }$ factor, leading the final loss to be $(1-p)^{\beta }\log p$ 
In Table TABREF18, we show the losses used in our experiments, which is described in the next section 
Experiments
We evaluate the proposed method on four NLP tasks: part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, machine reading comprehension and paraphrase identification  Baselines in our experiments are optimized by using the standard cross-entropy training objective 
Experiments ::: Part-of-Speech Tagging
Part-of-speech tagging (POS) is the task of assigning a label (e g , noun, verb, adjective) to each word in a given text  In this paper, we choose BERT as the backbone and conduct experiments on three Chinese POS datasets  We report the span-level micro-averaged precision, recall and F1 for evaluation  Hyperparameters are tuned on the corresponding development set of each dataset 
Experiments ::: Part-of-Speech Tagging ::: Datasets
We conduct experiments on the widely used Chinese Treebank 5 0, 6 0 as well as UD1 4 
CTB5 is a Chinese dataset for tagging and parsing, which contains 507,222 words, 824,983 characters and 18,782 sentences extracted from newswire sources 
CTB6 is an extension of CTB5, containing 781,351 words, 1,285,149 characters and 28,295 sentences 
UD is the abbreviation of Universal Dependencies, which is a framework for consistent annotation of grammar (parts of speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies) across different human languages  In this work, we use UD1 4 for Chinese POS tagging 
Experiments ::: Part-of-Speech Tagging ::: Baselines
We use the following baselines:
Joint-POS: shao2017character jointly learns Chinese word segmentation and POS 
Lattice-LSTM: lattice2018zhang constructs a word-character lattice 
Bert-Tagger: devlin2018bert treats part-of-speech as a tagging task

ground_truth: simply averaging the predictions from the constituent single models

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. How is the political bias of different sources included in the model?
Context 3: Introduction and related work
In recent years there has been increasing interest on the issue of disinformation spreading on online social media  Global concern over false (or "fake") news as a threat to modern democracies has been frequently raised–ever since 2016 US Presidential elections–in correspondence of events of political relevance, where the proliferation of manipulated and low-credibility content attempts to drive and influence people opinions BIBREF0BIBREF1BIBREF2BIBREF3 
Researchers have highlighted several drivers for the diffusion of such malicious phenomenon, which include human factors (confirmation bias BIBREF4, naive realism BIBREF5), algorithmic biases (filter bubble effect BIBREF0), the presence of deceptive agents on social platforms (bots and trolls BIBREF6) and, lastly, the formation of echo chambers BIBREF7 where people polarize their opinions as they are insulated from contrary perspectives 
The problem of automatically detecting online disinformation news has been typically formulated as a binary classification task (i e  credible vs non-credible articles), and tackled with a variety of different techniques, based on traditional machine learning and/or deep learning, which mainly differ in the dataset and the features they employ to perform the classification  We may distinguish three approaches: those built on content-based features, those based on features extracted from the social context, and those which combine both aspects  A few main challenges hinder the task, namely the impossibility to manually verify all news items, the lack of gold-standard datasets and the adversarial setting in which malicious content is created BIBREF3BIBREF6 
In this work we follow the direction pointed out in a few recent contributions on the diffusion of disinformation compared to traditional and objective information  These have shown that false news spread faster and deeper than true news BIBREF8, and that social bots and echo chambers play an important role in the diffusion of malicious content BIBREF6, BIBREF7  Therefore we focus on the analysis of spreading patterns which naturally arise on social platforms as a consequence of multiple interactions between users, due to the increasing trend in online sharing of news BIBREF0 
A deep learning framework for detection of fake news cascades is provided in BIBREF9, where the authors refer to BIBREF8 in order to collect Twitter cascades pertaining to verified false and true rumors  They employ geometric deep learning, a novel paradigm for graph-based structures, to classify cascades based on four categories of features, such as user profile, user activity, network and spreading, and content  They also observe that a few hours of propagation are sufficient to distinguish false news from true news with high accuracy  Diffusion cascades on Weibo and Twitter are analyzed in BIBREF10, where authors focus on highlighting different topological properties, such as the number of hops from the source or the heterogeneity of the network, to show that fake news shape diffusion networks which are highly different from credible news, even at early stages of propagation 
In this work, we consider the results of BIBREF11 as our baseline  The authors use off-the-shelf machine learning classifiers to accurately classify news articles leveraging Twitter diffusion networks  To this aim, they consider a set of basic features which can be qualitatively interpreted w r t to the social behavior of users sharing credible vs non-credible information  Their methodology is overall in accordance with BIBREF12, where authors successfully detect Twitter astroturfing content, i e  political campaigns disguised as spontaneous grassroots, with a machine learning framework based on network features 
In this paper, we propose a classification framework based on a multi-layer formulation of Twitter diffusion networks  For each article we disentangle different social interactions on Twitter, namely tweets, retweets, mentions, replies and quotes, to accordingly build a diffusion network composed of multiple layers (on for each type of interaction), and we compute structural features separately for each layer  We pick a set of global network properties from the network science toolbox which can be qualitatively explained in terms of social dimensions and allow us to encode different networks with a tuple of features  These include traditional indicators, e g  network density, number of strong/weak connected components and diameter, and more elaborated ones such as main K-core number BIBREF13 and structural virality BIBREF14  Our main research question is whether the use of a multi-layer, disentangled network yields a significant advance in terms of classification accuracy over a conventional single-layer diffusion network  Additionally, we are interested in understanding which of the above features, and in which layer, are most effective in the classification task 
We perform classification experiments with an off-the-shelf Logistic Regression model on two different datasets of mainstream and disinformation news shared on Twitter respectively in the United States and in Italy during 2019  In the former case we also account for political biases inherent to different news sources, referring to the procedure proposed in BIBREF2 to label different outlets  Overall we show that we are able to classify credible vs non-credible diffusion networks (and consequently news articles) with high accuracy (AUROC up to 94%), even when accounting for the political bias of sources (and training only on left-biased or right-biased articles)  We observe that the layer of mentions alone conveys useful information for the classification, denoting a different usage of this functionality when sharing news belonging to the two news domains  We also show that most discriminative features, which are relative to the breadth and depth of largest cascades in different layers, are the same across the two countries 
The outline of this paper is the following: we first formulate the problem and describe data collection, network representation and structural properties employed for the classification; then we provide experimental results–classification performances, layer and feature importance analyses and a temporal classification evaluation–and finally we draw conclusions and future directions 
Methodology ::: Disinformation and mainstream news
In this work we formulate our classification problem as follows: given two classes of news articles, respectively $D$ (disinformation) and $M$ (mainstream), a set of news articles $A_i$ and associated class labels $C_i \in \lbrace D,M\rbrace $, and a set of tweets $\Pi _i=\lbrace T_i^1, T_i^2,    \rbrace $ each of which contains an Uniform Resource Locator (URL) pointing explicitly to article $A_i$, predict the class $C_i$ of each article $A_i$  There is huge debate and controversy on a proper taxonomy of malicious and deceptive information BIBREF1BIBREF2BIBREF15BIBREF16BIBREF17BIBREF3BIBREF11  In this work we prefer the term disinformation to the more specific fake news to refer to a variety of misleading and harmful information  Therefore, we follow a source-based approach, a consolidated strategy also adopted by BIBREF6BIBREF16BIBREF2BIBREF1, in order to obtain relevant data for our analysis  We collected:
Disinformation articles, published by websites which are well-known for producing low-credibility content, false and misleading news reports as well as extreme propaganda and hoaxes and flagged as such by reputable journalists and fact-checkers;
Mainstream news, referring to traditional news outlets which deliver factual and credible information 
We believe that this is currently the most reliable classification approach, but it entails obvious limitations, as disinformation outlets may also publish true stories and likewise misinformation is sometimes reported on mainstream media  Also, given the choice of news sources, we cannot test whether our methodology is able to classify disinformation vs factual but not mainstream news which are published on niche, non-disinformation outlets 
Methodology ::: US dataset
We collected tweets associated to a dozen US mainstream news websites, i e  most trusted sources described in BIBREF18, with the Streaming API, and we referred to Hoaxy API BIBREF16 for what concerns tweets containing links to 100+ US disinformation outlets  We filtered out articles associated to less than 50 tweets  The resulting dataset contains overall $\sim $1 7 million tweets for mainstream news, collected in a period of three weeks (February 25th, 2019-March 18th, 2019), which are associated to 6,978 news articles, and $\sim $1 6 million tweets for disinformation, collected in a period of three months (January 1st, 2019-March 18th, 2019) for sake of balance of the two classes, which hold 5,775 distinct articles  Diffusion censoring effects BIBREF14 were correctly taken into account in both collection procedures  We provide in Figure FIGREF4 the distribution of articles by source and political bias for both news domains 
As it is reported that conservatives and liberals exhibit different behaviors on online social platforms BIBREF19BIBREF20BIBREF21, we further assigned a political bias label to different US outlets (and therefore news articles) following the procedure described in BIBREF2  In order to assess the robustness of our method, we performed classification experiments by training only on left-biased (or right-biased) outlets of both disinformation and mainstream domains and testing on the entire set of sources, as well as excluding particular sources that outweigh the others in terms of samples to avoid over-fitting 
Methodology ::: Italian dataset
For what concerns the Italian scenario we first collected tweets with the Streaming API in a 3-week period (April 19th, 2019-May 5th, 2019), filtering those containing URLs pointing to Italian official newspapers websites as described in BIBREF22; these correspond to the list provided by the association for the verification of newspaper circulation in Italy (Accertamenti Diffusione Stampa)  We instead referred to the dataset provided by BIBREF23 to obtain a set of tweets, collected continuously since January 2019 using the same Twitter endpoint, which contain URLs to 60+ Italian disinformation websites  In order to get balanced classes (April 5th, 2019-May 5th, 2019), we retained data collected in a longer period w r t to mainstream news  In both cases we filtered out articles with less than 50 tweets; overall this dataset contains $\sim $160k mainstream tweets, corresponding to 227 news articles, and $\sim $100k disinformation tweets, corresponding to 237 news articles  We provide in Figure FIGREF5 the distribution of articles according to distinct sources for both news domains  As in the US dataset, we took into account censoring effects BIBREF14 by excluding tweets published before (left-censoring) or after two weeks (right-censoring) from the beginning of the collection process 
The different volumes of news shared on Twitter in the two countries are due both to the different population size of US and Italy (320 vs 60 millions) but also to the different usage of Twitter platform (and social media in general) for news consumption BIBREF24  Both datasets analyzed in this work are available from the authors on request 
A crucial aspect in our approach is the capability to fully capturing sharing cascades on Twitter associated to news articles  It has been reported BIBREF25 that the Twitter streaming endpoint filters out tweets matching a given query if they exceed 1% of the global daily volume of shared tweets, which nowadays is approximately $5\cdot 10^8$; however, as we always collected less than $10^6$ tweets per day, we did not incur in this issue and we thus gathered 100% of tweets matching our query 
Methodology ::: Building diffusion networks
We built Twitter diffusion networks following an approach widely adopted in the literature BIBREF6BIBREF17BIBREF2  We remark that there is an unavoidable limitation in Twitter Streaming API, which does not allow to retrieve true re-tweeting cascades because re-tweets always point to the original source and not to intermediate re-tweeting users BIBREF8BIBREF14; thus we adopt the only viable approach based on Twitter's public availability of data  Besides, by disentangling different interactions with multiple layers we potentially reduce the impact of this limitation on the global network properties compared to the single-layer approach used in our baseline 
Using the notation described in BIBREF26  we employ a multi-layer representation for Twitter diffusion networks  Sociologists have indeed recognized decades ago that it is crucial to study social systems by constructing multiple social networks where different types of ties among same individuals are used BIBREF27  Therefore, for each news article we built a multi-layer diffusion network composed of four different layers, one for each type of social interaction on Twitter platform, namely retweet (RT), reply (R), quote (Q) and mention (M), as shown in Figure FIGREF11  These networks are not necessarily node-aligned, i e  users might be missing in some layers  We do not insert "dummy" nodes to represent all users as it would have severe impact on the global network properties (e g  number of weakly connected components)  Alternatively one may look at each multi-layer diffusion network as an ensemble of individual graphs BIBREF26; since global network properties are computed separately for each layer, they are not affected by the presence of any inter-layer edges 
In our multi-layer representation, each layer is a directed graph where we add edges and nodes for each tweet of the layer type, e g  for the RT layer: whenever user $a$ retweets account $b$ we first add nodes $a$ and $b$ if not already present in the RT layer, then we build an edge that goes from $b$ to $a$ if it does not exists or we increment the weight by 1  Similarly for the other layers: for the R layer edges go from user $a$ (who replies) to user $b$, for the Q layer edges go from user $b$ (who is quoted by) to user $a$ and for the M layer edges go from user $a$ (who mentions) to user $b$ 
Note that, by construction, our layers do not include isolated nodes; they correspond to "pure tweets", i e  tweets which have not originated any interactions with other users  However, they are present in our dataset, and their number is exploited for classification, as described below 
Methodology ::: Global network properties
We used a set of global network indicators which allow us to encode each network layer by a tuple of features  Then we simply concatenated tuples as to represent each multi-layer network with a single feature vector  We used the following global network properties:
Number of Strongly Connected Components (SCC): a Strongly Connected Component of a directed graph is a maximal (sub)graph where for each pair of vertices $u,v$ there is a path in each direction ($u\rightarrow v$, $v\rightarrow u$) 
Size of the Largest Strongly Connected Component (LSCC): the number of nodes in the largest strongly connected component of a given graph 
Number of Weakly Connected Components (WCC): a Weakly Connected Component of a directed graph is a maximal (sub)graph where for each pair of vertices $(u, v)$ there is a path $u \leftrightarrow v$ ignoring edge directions 
Size of the Largest Weakly Connected Component (LWCC): the number of nodes in the largest weakly connected component of a given graph 
Diameter of the Largest Weakly Connected Component (DWCC): the largest distance (length of the shortest path) between two nodes in the (undirected version of) largest weakly connected component of a graph 
Average Clustering Coefficient (CC): the average of the local clustering coefficients of all nodes in a graph; the local clustering coefficient of a node quantifies how close its neighbours are to being a complete graph (or a clique)  It is computed according to BIBREF28 
Main K-core Number (KC): a K-core BIBREF13 of a graph is a maximal sub-graph that contains nodes of internal degree $k$ or more; the main K-core number is the highest value of $k$ (in directed graphs the total degree is considered) 
Density (d): the density for directed graphs is $d=\frac{|E|}{|V||V-1|}$, where $|E|$ is the number of edges and $|N|$ is the number of vertices in the graph; the density equals 0 for a graph without edges and 1 for a complete graph 
Structural virality of the largest weakly connected component (SV): this measure is defined in BIBREF14 as the average distance between all pairs of nodes in a cascade tree or, equivalently, as the average depth of nodes, averaged over all nodes in turn acting as a root; for $|V| > 1$ vertices, $SV=\frac{1}{|V||V-1|}\sum _i\sum _j d_{ij}$ where $d_{ij}$ denotes the length of the shortest path between nodes $i$ and $j$  This is equivalent to compute the Wiener's index BIBREF29 of the graph and multiply it by a factor $\frac{1}{|V||V-1|}$  In our case we computed it for the undirected equivalent graph of the largest weakly connected component, setting it to 0 whenever $V=1$ 
We used networkx Python package BIBREF30 to compute all features  Whenever a layer is empty  we simply set to 0 all its features  In addition to computing the above nine features for each layer, we added two indicators for encoding information about pure tweets, namely the number T of pure tweets (containing URLs to a given news article) and the number U of unique users authoring those tweets  Therefore, a single diffusion network is represented by a vector with $9\cdot 4+2=38$ entries 
Methodology ::: Interpretation of network features and layers
Aforementioned network properties can be qualitatively explained in terms of social footprints as follows: SCC correlates with the size of the diffusion network, as the propagation of news occurs in a broadcast manner most of the time, i e  re-tweets dominate on other interactions, while LSCC allows to distinguish cases where such mono-directionality is somehow broken  WCC equals (approximately) the number of distinct diffusion cascades pertaining to each news article, with exceptions corresponding to those cases where some cascades merge together via Twitter interactions such as mentions, quotes and replies, and accordingly LWCC and DWCC equals the size and the depth of the largest cascade  CC corresponds to the level of connectedness of neighboring users in a given diffusion network whereas KC identifies the set of most influential users in a network and describes the efficiency of information spreading BIBREF17  Finally, d describes the proportions of potential connections between users which are actually activated and SV indicates whether a news item has gained popularity with a single and large broadcast or in a more viral fashion through multiple generations 
For what concerns different Twitter actions, users primarily interact with each other using retweets and mentions BIBREF20 
The former are the main engagement activity and act as a form of endorsement, allowing users to rebroadcast content generated by other users BIBREF31  Besides, when node B retweets node A we have an implicit confirmation that information from A appeared in B's Twitter feed BIBREF12  Quotes are simply a special case of retweets with comments 
Mentions usually include personal conversations as they allow someone to address a specific user or to refer to an individual in the third person; in the first case they are located at the beginning of a tweet and they are known as replies, otherwise they are put in the body of a tweet BIBREF20  The network of mentions is usually seen as a stronger version of interactions between Twitter users, compared to the traditional graph of follower/following relationships BIBREF32 
Experiments ::: Setup
We performed classification experiments using a basic off-the-shelf classifier, namely Logistic Regression (LR) with L2 penalty; this also allows us to compare results with our baseline  We applied a standardization of the features and we used the default configuration for parameters as described in scikit-learn package BIBREF33  We also tested other classifiers (such as K-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines and Random Forest) but we omit results as they give comparable performances  We remark that our goal is to show that a very simple machine learning framework, with no parameter tuning and optimization, allows for accurate results with our network-based approach 
We used the following evaluation metrics to assess the performances of different classifiers (TP=true positives, FP=false positives, FN=false negatives):
Precision = $\frac{TP}{TP+FP}$, the ability of a classifier not to label as positive a negative sample 
Recall = $\frac{TP}{TP+FN}$, the ability of a classifier to retrieve all positive samples 
F1-score = $2 \frac{\mbox{Precision} \cdot \mbox{Recall}}{\mbox{Precision} + \mbox{Recall}}$, the harmonic average of Precision and Recall 
Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUROC); the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve BIBREF34, which plots the TP rate versus the FP rate, shows the ability of a classifier to discriminate positive samples from negative ones as its threshold is varied; the AUROC value is in the range $[0, 1]$, with the random baseline classifier holding AUROC$=0 5$ and the ideal perfect classifier AUROC$=1$; thus larger AUROC values (and steeper ROCs) correspond to better classifiers 
In particular we computed so-called macro average–simple unweighted mean–of these metrics evaluated considering both labels (disinformation and mainstream)  We employed stratified shuffle split cross validation (with 10 folds) to evaluate performances 
Finally, we partitioned networks according to the total number of unique users involved in the sharing, i e  the number of nodes in the aggregated network represented with a single-layer representation considering together all layers and also pure tweets  A breakdown of both datasets according to size class (and political biases for the US scenario) is provided in Table 1 and Table 2 
Experiments ::: Classification performances
In Table 3 we first provide classification performances on the US dataset for the LR classifier evaluated on the size class described in Table 1  We can observe that in all instances our methodology performs better than a random classifier (50% AUROC), with AUROC values above 85% in all cases 
For what concerns political biases, as the classes of mainstream and disinformation networks are not balanced (e g , 1,292 mainstream and 4,149 disinformation networks with right bias) we employ a Balanced Random Forest with default parameters (as provided in imblearn Python package BIBREF35)  In order to test the robustness of our methodology, we trained only on left-biased networks or right-biased networks and tested on the entire set of sources (relative to the US dataset); we provide a comparison of AUROC values for both biases in Figure 4  We can notice that our multi-layer approach still entails significant results, thus showing that it can accurately distinguish mainstream news from disinformation regardless of the political bias  We further corroborated this result with additional classification experiments, that show similar performances, in which we excluded from the training/test set two specific sources (one at a time and both at the same time) that outweigh the others in terms of data samples–respectively "breitbart com" for right-biased sources and "politicususa com" for left-biased ones 
We performed classification experiments on the Italian dataset using the LR classifier and different size classes (we excluded $[1000, +\infty )$ which is empty); we show results for different evaluation metrics in Table 3  We can see that despite the limited number of samples (one order of magnitude smaller than the US dataset) the performances are overall in accordance with the US scenario  As shown in Table 4, we obtain results which are much better than our baseline in all size classes (see Table 4):
In the US dataset our multi-layer methodology performs much better in all size classes except for large networks ($[1000, +\infty )$ size class), reaching up to 13% improvement on smaller networks ($[0, 100)$ size class);
In the IT dataset our multi-layer methodology outperforms the baseline in all size classes, with the maximum performance gain (20%) on medium networks ($[100, 1000)$ size class); the baseline generally reaches bad performances compared to the US scenario 
Overall, our performances are comparable with those achieved by two state-of-the-art deep learning models for "fake news" detection BIBREF9BIBREF36 
Experiments ::: Layer importance analysis
In order to understand the impact of each layer on the performances of classifiers, we performed additional experiments considering separately each layer (we ignored T and U features relative to pure tweets)  In Table 5 we show metrics for each layer and all size classes, computed with a 10-fold stratified shuffle split cross validation, evaluated on the US dataset; in Figure 5 we show AUROC values for each layer compared with the general multi-layer approach  We can notice that both Q and M layers alone capture adequately the discrepancies of the two distinct news domains in the United States as they obtain good results with AUROC values in the range 75%-86%; these are comparable with those of the multi-layer approach which, nevertheless, outperforms them across all size classes 
We obtained similar performances for the Italian dataset, as the M layer obtains comparable performances w r t multi-layer approach with AUROC values in the range 72%-82%  We do not show these results for sake of conciseness 
Experiments ::: Feature importance analysis
We further investigated the importance of each feature by performing a $\chi ^2$ test, with 10-fold stratified shuffle split cross validation, considering the entire range of network sizes $[0, +\infty )$  We show the Top-5 most discriminative features for each country in Table 6 
We can notice the exact same set of features (with different relative orderings in the Top-3) in both countries; these correspond to two global network propertie–LWCC, which indicates the size of the largest cascade in the layer, and SCC, which correlates with the size of the network–associated to the same set of layers (Quotes, Retweets and Mentions) 
We further performed a $\chi ^2$ test to highlight the most discriminative features in the M layer of both countries, which performed equally well in the classification task as previously highlighted; also in this case we focused on the entire range of network sizes $[0, +\infty )$  Interestingly, we discovered exactly the same set of Top-3 features in both countries, namely LWCC, SCC and DWCC (which indicates the depth of the largest cascade in the layer) 
An inspection of the distributions of all aforementioned features revealed that disinformation news exhibit on average larger values than mainstream news 
We can qualitatively sum up these results as follows:
Sharing patterns in the two news domains exhibit discrepancies which might be country-independent and due to the content that is being shared 
Interactions in disinformation sharing cascades tends to be broader and deeper than in mainstream news, as widely reported in the literature BIBREF8BIBREF2BIBREF7 
Users likely make a different usage of mentions when sharing news belonging to the two domains, consequently shaping different sharing patterns 
Experiments ::: Temporal analysis
Similar to BIBREF9, we carried out additional experiments to answer the following question: how long do we need to observe a news spreading on Twitter in order to accurately classify it as disinformation or mainstream?
With this goal, we built several versions of our original dataset of multi-layer networks by considering in turn the following lifetimes: 1 hour, 6 hours, 12 hours, 1 day, 2 days, 3 days and 7 days; for each case, we computed the global network properties of the corresponding network and evaluated the LR classifier with 10-fold cross validation, separately for each lifetime (and considering always the entire set of networks)  We show corresponding AUROC values for both US and IT datasets in Figure 6 
We can see that in both countries news diffusion networks can be accurately classified after just a few hours of spreading, with AUROC values which are larger than 80% after only 6 hours of diffusion  These results are very promising and suggest that articles pertaining to the two news domains exhibit discrepancies in their sharing patterns that can be timely exploited in order to rapidly detect misleading items from factual information 
Conclusions
In this work we tackled the problem of the automatic classification of news articles in two domains, namely mainstream and disinformation news, with a language-independent approach which is based solely on the diffusion of news items on Twitter social platform  We disentangled different types of interactions on Twitter to accordingly build a multi-layer representation of news diffusion networks, and we computed a set of global network properties–separately for each layer–in order to encode each network with a tuple of features  Our goal was to investigate whether a multi-layer representation performs better than one layer BIBREF11, and to understand which of the features, observed at given layers, are most effective in the classification task 
Experiments with an off-the-shelf classifier such as Logistic Regression on datasets pertaining to two different media landscapes (US and Italy) yield very accurate classification results (AUROC up to 94%), even when accounting for the different political bias of news sources, which are far better than our baseline BIBREF11 with improvements up to 20%  Classification performances using single layers show that the layer of mentions alone entails better performance w r t other layers in both countries 
We also highlighted the most discriminative features across different layers in both countries; the results suggest that differences between the two news domains might be country-independent but rather due only to the typology of content shared, and that disinformation news shape broader and deeper cascades 
Additional experiments involving the temporal evolution of Twitter diffusion networks show that our methodology can accurate classify mainstream and disinformation news after a few hours of propagation on the platform 
Overall, our results prove that the topological features of multi-layer diffusion networks might be effectively exploited to detect online disinformation  We do not deny the presence of deceptive efforts to orchestrate the regular spread of information on social media via content amplification and manipulation BIBREF37BIBREF38  On the contrary, we postulate that such hidden forces might play to accentuate the discrepancies between the diffusion patterns of disinformation and mainstream news (and thus to make our methodology effective) 
In the future we aim to further investigate three directions: (1) employ temporal networks to represent news diffusion and apply classification techniques that take into account the sequential aspect of data (e g  recurrent neural networks); (2) carry out an extensive comparison of the diffusion of disinformation and mainstream news across countries to investigate deeper the presence of differences and similarities in sharing patterns; (3) leverage our network-based features in addition to state-of-the-art text-based approaches for "fake news" dete ction in order to deliver a real-world system to detect misleading and harmful information spreading on social media 

ground_truth: By assigning a political bias label to each news article and training only on left-biased or right-biased outlets of both disinformation and mainstream domains

we also account for political biases inherent to different news sources, referring to the procedure proposed in BIBREF2 to label different outlets. Overall we show that we are able to classify credible vs non-credible diffusion networks (and consequently news articles) with high accuracy (AUROC up to 94%), even when accounting for the political bias of sources (and training only on left-biased or right-biased articles). We observe that the layer of mentions alone conveys useful information for the classification, denoting a different usage of this functionality when sharing news belonging to the two news domains. We also show that most discriminative features, which are relative to the breadth and depth of largest cascades in different layers, are the same across the two countries.