Mediaspace scheduled maintenance: Aug 25, 2026 07:00 - 12:00 AM. During this time, videos will be temporarily unavailable. Check status updates.

Home

Person

Robert West

About
Privacy
Disclaimer

Graph Chatbot

Related publications (64)

Page 2 of 4

Compiling Questions into Balanced Quizzes about Documents

Robert West, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey

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 ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2018

A Large-Scale Characterization of How Readers Browse Wikipedia

Robert West, Tiziano Piccardi, Akhil Arora

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 ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2023

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

Robert West, Andreas Oliver Spitz, Ahmad Abu-Akel

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 ...

Frontiers Media2021

Classifying Dyads for Militarized Conflict Analysis

Robert West

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 ...

ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL2021

Population-scale dietary interests during the COVID-19 pandemic

Robert West, Kristina Gligoric

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 ...

Nature Portfolio2022

Node Attribute Completion in Knowledge Graphs with Multi-Relational Propagation

Robert West, Alberto Garcia Duran, Eda Bayram

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 ...

2021

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

Marie Mouna Reignier Tayar, Jordi Cluet I Martinell, Robert West, Manoel Horta Ribeiro

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 ...

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)2025

Why the World Reads Wikipedia: Beyond English Speakers

Robert West

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, ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2019

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

Robert West

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 ...

MIT PRESS2021

A Logical Fallacy-Informed Framework for Argument Generation

Boi Faltings, Robert West, Antoine Bosselut, Debjit Paul, Shaobo Cui, Luca Mouchel

Despite the remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs), they still struggle with generating logically sound arguments, resulting in potential risks such as spreading misinformation. An important factor contributing to LLMs' suboptimal performan ...

Association for Computational Linguistics2025

Quote Erat Demonstrandum: AWeb Interface for Exploring the Quotebank Corpus

Robert West, Akhil Arora, Andreas Oliver Spitz

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 ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022

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

Robert West, Manoel Horta Ribeiro

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 ...

National Academy of Sciences2024

Self-Recognition in Language Models

Veniamin Veselovskyy, Tim Ruben Davidson, Viacheslav Surkov, Robert West, Caglar Gulcehre, Giuseppe Russo

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 ...

Association for Computational Linguistics2024

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

Robert West, Gael Lederrey

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 ...

2018

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

Robert West, Maxime Jean Julien Peyrard, Marija Sakota

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 ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2024

In-Class Data Analysis Replications: Teaching StudentsWhile Testing Science

Robert West

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 ...

MIT PRESS2024

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

Robert West, Kristina Gligoric

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 ...

2021

Better than Average: Paired Evaluation of NLP Systems

Robert West, Maxime Jean Julien Peyrard

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 ...

ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL2021

Volunteer contributions to Wikipedia increased during COVID-19 mobility restrictions

Robert West, Manoel Horta Ribeiro

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 ...

Nature Portfolio2021

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

Robert West, Andreas Oliver Spitz, Ahmad Abu-Akel

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 ...

2021