Misinformation detection at the level of full news articles is a text classification problem. Reliably labeled data in this domain is rare. Previous work relied on news articles collected from so-called “reputable” and “suspicious” websites and labeled accordingly. We leverage fact-checking websites to collect individually-labeled news articles with regard to the veracity of their content and use this data to test the cross-domain generalization of a classifier trained on bigger text collections but labeled according to source reputation. Our results suggest that reputation-based classification is not sufficient for predicting the veracity level of the majority of news articles, and that the system performance on different test datasets depends on topic distribution. Therefore collecting well-balanced and carefully-assessed training data is a priority for developing robust misinformation detection systems.

Word embeddings obtained from neural network models such as Word2Vec Skipgram have become popular representations of word meaning and have been evaluated on a variety of word similarity and relatedness norming data. Skipgram generates a set of word and context embeddings, the latter typically discarded after training. We demonstrate the usefulness of context embeddings in predicting asymmetric association between words from a recently published dataset of production norms (Jouravlev & McRae, 2016). Our findings suggest that humans respond with words closer to the cue within the context embedding space (rather than the word embedding space), when asked to generate thematically related words.

Recent studies of distributional semantic models have set up a competition between word embeddings obtained from predictive neural networks and word vectors obtained from abstractive count-based models. This paper is an attempt to reveal the underlying contribution of additional training data and post-processing steps on each type of model in word similarity and relatedness inference tasks. We do so by designing an artificial language framework, training a predictive and a count-based model on data sampled from this grammar, and evaluating the resulting word vectors in paradigmatic and syntagmatic tasks defined with respect to the grammar.