Publications by Robert West | EPFL Graph Search

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Despite the importance and pervasiveness of Wikipedia as one of the largest platforms for open knowledge, surprisingly little is known about how people navigate its content when seeking information. To bridge this gap, we present the first systematic large ...

In the educational framework, knowledge assessment is a critical component, and quizzes (sets of questions with concise answers) are a popular tool for this purpose. This paper focuses on the generation of balanced quizzes, i.e., quizzes that relate to a g ...

Effective communication during a pandemic, such as the current COVID-19 crisis, can save lives. At the present time, social and physical distancing measures are the lead strategy in combating the spread of COVID-19. In this study, a survey was administered ...

Understanding the origins of militarized conflict is a complex, yet important undertaking. Existing research seeks to build this understanding by considering bi-lateral relationships between entity pairs (dyadic causes) and multi-lateral relationships amon ...

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has altered people's lives around the world. Here we document population-wide shifts in dietary interests in 18 countries in 2020, as revealed through time series of Google search volumes. We find that during the first wave of the COVI ...

From politicians to podcast hosts, online platforms have systematically banned (''deplatformed'') influential users for breaking platform guidelines. Previous inquiries on the effectiveness of this intervention are inconclusive because 1) they consider onl ...

The existing literature on knowledge graph completion mostly focuses on the link prediction task. However, knowledge graphs have an additional incompleteness problem: their nodes possess numerical attributes, whose values are often missing. Our approach, d ...

As one of the Web's primary multilingual knowledge sources, Wikipedia is read by millions of people across the globe every day. Despite this global readership, little is known about why users read Wikipedia's various language editions. To bridge this gap, ...

Wikipedia's content is based on reliable and published sources. To this date, relatively little is known about what sources Wikipedia relies on, in part because extracting citations and identifying cited sources is challenging. To close this gap, we releas ...

The use of attributed quotes is the most direct and least filtered pathway of information propagation in news. Consequently, quotes play a central role in the conception, reception, and analysis of news stories. Since quotes provide a more direct window in ...

the effects of the algorithm from a user's intentions. Here we propose a method that we call "counterfactual bots" to causally estimate the role of algorithmic recommendations on the consumption of highly partisan content on YouTube. By comparing bots that ...

A rapidly growing number of applications rely on a small set of closed-source language models (LMs). This dependency might introduce novel security risks if LMs develop self-recognition capabilities. Inspired by human identity verification methods, we prop ...

As online shopping becomes ever more prevalent, customers rely increasingly on product rating websites for making purchase decisions. The reliability of online ratings, however, is potentially compromised by the so-called herding effect: when rating a prod ...

Generative language models (LMs) have become omnipresent across data science. For a wide variety of tasks, inputs can be phrased as natural language prompts for an LM, from whose output the solution can then be extracted. LM performance has consistently be ...

Science is facing a reproducibility crisis. Overcoming it would require concerted efforts to replicate prior studies, but the incentives for researchers are currently weak, as replicating prior studies requires considerable time and effort without providin ...

What makes written text appealing? In this registered report protocol, we propose to study the linguistic characteristics of news headline success using a large-scale dataset of field experiments (A/B tests) conducted on the popular website Upworthy compar ...

Evaluation in NLP is usually done by comparing the scores of competing systems independently averaged over a common set of test instances. In this work, we question the use of averages for aggregating evaluation scores into a final number used to decide wh ...

Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia ever created, is a global initiative driven by volunteer contributions. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and mobility restrictions ensued across the globe, it was unclear whether contributions to Wikipedia would decr ...

It is urgent to understand how to effectively communicate public health messages during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous work has focused on how to formulate messages in terms of style and content, rather than on who should send them. In particular, little ...

Measuring the intensity of events is crucial for monitoring and tracking armed conflict. Advances in automated event extraction have yielded massive data sets of '' who did what to whom '' micro-records that enable datadriven approaches to monitoring confl ...

Robert West

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A Large-Scale Characterization of How Readers Browse Wikipedia

Compiling Questions into Balanced Quizzes about Documents

Who Is Listening? Spokesperson Effect on Communicating Social and Physical Distancing Measures During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Classifying Dyads for Militarized Conflict Analysis

Population-scale dietary interests during the COVID-19 pandemic

Deplatforming Norm-Violating Influencers on Social Media Reduces Overall Online Attention Toward Them

Node Attribute Completion in Knowledge Graphs with Multi-Relational Propagation

Why the World Reads Wikipedia: Beyond English Speakers

Wikipedia citations: A comprehensive data set of citations with identifiers extracted from English Wikipedia

Quote Erat Demonstrandum: AWeb Interface for Exploring the Quotebank Corpus

Causally estimating the effect of YouTube's recommender system using counterfactual bots

Self-Recognition in Language Models

When Sheep Shop: Measuring Herding Effects in Product Ratings with Natural Experiments

Fly-Swat or Cannon? Cost-Effective Language Model Choice via Meta-Modeling

In-Class Data Analysis Replications: Teaching StudentsWhile Testing Science

Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments (Registered Report Protocol)

Better than Average: Paired Evaluation of NLP Systems

Volunteer contributions to Wikipedia increased during COVID-19 mobility restrictions

The effect of spokesperson attribution on public health message sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic

An Ordinal Latent Variable Model of Conflict Intensity