Multi-Task Ordinal Regression for Jointly Predicting the Trustworthiness and the Leading Political Ideology of News Media

Ramy Baly, Georgi Karadzhov, Abdelrhman Saleh, James Glass, Preslav Nakov


Abstract
In the context of fake news, bias, and propaganda, we study two important but relatively under-explored problems: (i) trustworthiness estimation (on a 3-point scale) and (ii) political ideology detection (left/right bias on a 7-point scale) of entire news outlets, as opposed to evaluating individual articles. In particular, we propose a multi-task ordinal regression framework that models the two problems jointly. This is motivated by the observation that hyper-partisanship is often linked to low trustworthiness, e.g., appealing to emotions rather than sticking to the facts, while center media tend to be generally more impartial and trustworthy. We further use several auxiliary tasks, modeling centrality, hyper-partisanship, as well as left-vs.-right bias on a coarse-grained scale. The evaluation results show sizable performance gains by the joint models over models that target the problems in isolation.
Anthology ID:
N19-1216
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2109–2116
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1216
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1216
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ramy Baly, Georgi Karadzhov, Abdelrhman Saleh, James Glass, and Preslav Nakov. 2019. Multi-Task Ordinal Regression for Jointly Predicting the Trustworthiness and the Leading Political Ideology of News Media. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 2109–2116, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Task Ordinal Regression for Jointly Predicting the Trustworthiness and the Leading Political Ideology of News Media (Baly et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1216.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N19-1216.mp4