TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: The Internet and online forums such as Reddit have become an increasingly popular medium for citizens to engage in political conversations. However, the online disinhibition effect resulting from the ability to use pseudonymous identities may manifest in the form of offensive speech, consequently making political discussions more aggressive and polarizing than they already are. Such environments may result in harassment and self-censorship from its targets. In this paper, we present preliminary results from a large-scale temporal measurement aimed at quantifying offensiveness in online political discussions. To enable our measurements, we develop and evaluate an offensive speech classifier. We then use this classifier to quantify and compare offensiveness in the political and general contexts. We perform our study using a database of over 168M Reddit comments made by over 7M pseudonyms between January 2015 and January 2017 a period covering several divisive political events including the 2016 US presidential elections.

SOLUTION: Measuring Offensive Speech in Online Political Discourse

PROBLEM: The belief bias effect is a phenomenon which occurs when we think that we judge an argument based on our reasoning, but are actually influenced by our beliefs and prior knowledge. Evans, Barston and Pollard carried out a psychological syllogistic reasoning task to prove this effect. Participants were asked whether they would accept or reject a given syllogism. We discuss one specific case which is commonly assumed to be believable but which is actually not logically valid. By introducing abnormalities, abduction and background knowledge, we adequately model this case under the weak completion semantics. Our formalization reveals new questions about possible extensions in abductive reasoning. For instance, observations and their explanations might include some relevant prior abductive contextual information concerning some side-effect or leading to a contestable or refutable side-effect. A weaker notion indicates the support of some relevant consequences by a prior abductive context. Yet another definition describes jointly supported relevant consequences, which captures the idea of two observations containing mutually supportive side-effects. Though motivated with and exemplified by the running psychology application, the various new general abductive context definitions are introduced here and given a declarative semantics for the first time, and have a much wider scope of application. Inspection points, a concept introduced by Pereira and Pinto, allows us to express these definitions syntactically and intertwine them into an operational semantics.

SOLUTION: Contextual Abductive Reasoning with Side-Effects

PROBLEM: An RDF data shape is a description of the expected contents of an RDF document (aka graph) or dataset. A major part of this description is the set of constraints that the document or dataset is required to satisfy. W3C recently (2014) chartered the RDF Data Shapes Working Group to define SHACL, a standard RDF data shape language. We refer to the ability to name and reference shape language elements as recursion. This article provides a precise definition of the meaning of recursion as used in Resource Shape 2.0. The definition of recursion presented in this article is largely independent of language-specific details. We speculate that it also applies to ShEx and to all three of the current proposals for SHACL. In particular, recursion is not permitted in the SHACL-SPARQL proposal, but we conjecture that recursion could be added by using the definition proposed here as a top-level control structure.

SOLUTION:
Recursion in RDF Data Shape Languages