Discovering Influencers in Opinion Formation over Social Graphs

The adaptive social learning paradigm helps model how networked agents are able to form opinions on a state of nature and track its drifts in a changing environment. In this framework, the agents repeatedly update their beliefs based on private observations and exchange the beliefs with their neighbors. In this work, it is shown how the sequence of publicly exchanged beliefs over time allows users to discover rich information about the underlying network topology and about the flow of information over graph. In particular, it is shown that it is possible (i) to identify the influence of each individual agent to the objective of truth learning, (ii) to discover how well informed each agent is, (iii) to quantify the pairwise influences between agents, and (iv) to learn the underlying network topology. The algorithm derived herein is also able to work under non-stationary environments where either the true state of nature or the network topology are allowed to drift over time. We apply the proposed algorithm to different subnetworks of Twitter users, and identify the most influential and central agents merely by using their public tweets (posts).

Unsupervised Simplification of Legal Texts

The processing of legal texts has been developing as an emerging field in natural language processing (NLP). Legal texts contain unique jargon and complex linguistic attributes in vocabulary, semantics, syntax, and morphology. Therefore, the development of text simplification (TS) methods specific to the legal domain is of paramount importance for facilitating comprehension of legal text by ordinary people and providing inputs to high-level models for mainstream legal NLP applications. While a recent study proposed a rule-based TS method for legal text, learning-based TS in the legal domain has not been considered previously. Here we introduce an unsupervised simplification method for legal texts (USLT). USLT performs domain-specific TS by replacing complex words and splitting long sentences. To this end, USLT detects complex words in a sentence, generates candidates via a masked-transformer model, and selects a candidate for substitution based on a rank score. Afterward, USLT recursively decomposes long sentences into a hierarchy of shorter core and context sentences while preserving semantic meaning. We demonstrate that USLT outperforms state-of-the-art domain-general TS methods in text simplicity while keeping the semantics intact.