Automating Historical Insight Extraction from Large-Scale Newspaper Archives via Neural Topic Modeling

Extracting coherent and human-understandable themes from large collections of unstructured historical newspaper archives presents significant challenges due to topic evolution, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) noise, and the sheer volume of text. Traditional topic-modeling methods, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), often fall short in capturing the complexity and dynamic nature of discourse in historical texts. To address these limitations, we employ BERTopic. This neural topic-modeling approach leverages transformerbased embeddings to extract and classify topics, which, despite its growing popularity, still remains underused in historical research. Our study focuses on articles published between 1955 and 2018, specifically examining discourse on nuclear power and nuclear safety. We analyze various topic distributions across the corpus and trace their temporal evolution to uncover long-term trends and shifts in public discourse. This enables us to more accurately explore patterns in public discourse, including the co-occurrence of themes related to nuclear power and nuclear weapons and their shifts in topic importance over time. Our study demonstrates the scalability and contextual sensitivity of BERTopic as an alternative to traditional approaches, offering richer insights into historical discourses extracted from newspaper archives. These findings contribute to historical, nuclear, and social-science research while reflecting on current limitations and proposing potential directions for future work.

M-DAIGT: A Shared Task on Multi-Domain Detection of AI-Generated Text

The generation of highly fluent text by Large Language Models (LLMs) poses a significant challenge to information integrity and academic research. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-Domain Detection of AI-Generated Text (M-DAIGT) shared task, which focuses on detecting AI-generated text across multiple domains, particularly in news articles and academic writing. M-DAIGT comprises two binary classification subtasks: News Article Detection (NAD) (Subtask 1) and Academic Writing Detection (AWD) (Subtask 2). To support this task, we developed and released a new large-scale benchmark dataset of 30,000 samples, balanced between human-written and AI-generated texts. The AI-generated content was produced using a variety of modern LLMs (e.g., GPT-4, Claude) and diverse prompting strategies. A total of 46 unique teams registered for the shared task, of which four teams submitted final results. All four teams participated in both Subtask 1 and Subtask 2. We describe the methods employed by these participating teams and briefly discuss future directions for M-DAIGT.

DomURLs_BERT: Pre-trained BERT-based Model for Malicious Domains and URLs Detection and Classification

Detecting and classifying suspicious or malicious domain names and URLs is fundamental task in cybersecurity. To leverage such indicators of compromise, cybersecurity vendors and practitioners often maintain and update blacklists of known malicious domains and URLs. However, blacklists frequently fail to identify emerging and obfuscated threats. Over the past few decades, there has been significant interest in developing machine learning models that automatically detect malicious domains and URLs, addressing the limitations of blacklists maintenance and updates. In this paper, we introduce DomURLs_BERT, a pre-trained BERT-based encoder adapted for detecting and classifying suspicious/malicious domains and URLs. DomURLs_BERT is pre-trained using the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective on a large multilingual corpus of URLs, domain names, and Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA) dataset. In order to assess the performance of DomURLs_BERT, we have conducted experiments on several binary and multi-class classification tasks involving domain names and URLs, covering phishing, malware, DGA, and DNS tunneling. The evaluations results show that the proposed encoder outperforms state-of-the-art character-based deep learning models and cybersecurity-focused BERT models across multiple tasks and datasets. The pre-training dataset, the pre-trained DomURLs_BERT encoder, and the experiments source code are publicly available.