Publications by Robert West | EPFL Graph Search

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Humor is an essential human trait. Efforts to understand humor have called out links between humor and the foundations of cognition, as well as the importance of humor in social engagement. As such, it is a promising and important subject of study, with re ...

Online platforms have banned ("deplatformed") influencers, communities, and even entire websites to reduce content deemed harmful. Deplatformed users often migrate to alternative platforms, which raises concerns about the effectiveness of deplatforming. He ...

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

Every day millions of people read Wikipedia. When navigating the vast space of available topics using hyperlinks, readers describe trajectories on the article network. Understanding these navigation patterns is crucial to better serve readers' needs and ad ...

Language models (LMs) have recently shown remarkable performance on reasoning tasks by explicitly generating intermediate inferences, e.g., chain-of-thought prompting. However, these intermediate inference steps may be in- appropriate deductions from the i ...

Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the Web and a common source of information for many users. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia was not conceived as a source of original information, but as a gateway to secondary sources: according to Wikipedia's gu ...

Early work has found that large language models (LLMs) can generate persuasive content. However, evidence on whether they can also personalize arguments to individual attributes remains limited, despite being crucial for assessing misuse. This preregistere ...

Wikipedia is a well-known platform for disseminating knowledge, and scientific sources, such as journal articles, play a critical role in supporting its mission. The open access movement aims to make scientific knowledge openly available, and we might intu ...

We present Quotebank, an open corpus of 178 million quotations attributed to the speakers who uttered them, extracted from 162 million English news articles published between 2008 and 2020. In order to produce this Web-scale corpus, while at the same time ...

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to perform better when asked to reason step-by-step before answering a question. However, it is unclear to what degree the model's final answer is faithful to the stated reasoning steps. In this paper, we perfor ...

We present Wikipedia-based Polyglot Dirichlet Allocation (WikiPDA), a crosslingual topic model that learns to represent Wikipedia articles written in any language as distributions over a common set of language-independent topics. It leverages the fact that ...

Given the prompt “Rome is in”, can we steer a language model to flip its prediction of an incorrect token “France” to a correct token “Italy” by only multiplying a few relevant activation vectors with scalars? We argue that successfully intervening on a mo ...

Candidate generation is a crucial module in entity linking. It also plays a key role in multiple NLP tasks that have been proven to beneficially leverage knowledge bases. Nevertheless, it has often been overlooked in the monolingual English entity linking ...

A critical component of a successful language generation pipeline is the decoding algorithm. However, the general principles that should guide the choice of a decoding algorithm re- main unclear. Previous works only compare decoding algorithms in narrow sc ...

The automatic detection of humor poses a grand challenge for natural language processing. Transformer-based systems have recently achieved remarkable results on this task, but they usually (1) were evaluated in setups where serious vs humorous texts came f ...

Neural methods have become the de-facto choice for the vast majority of data analysis tasks, and entity alignment (EA) is no exception. Not surprisingly, more than 50 different neural EA methods have been published since 2017. However, surprisingly, an ana ...

Robert West

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Reverse-Engineering Satire, or "Paper on Computational Humor Accepted despite Making Serious Advances"

Deplatforming did not decrease Parler users' activity on fringe social media

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

Wikipedia Reader Navigation: When Synthetic Data Is Enough

REFINER: Reasoning Feedback on Intermediate Representations

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia. (Part 3)

On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4

Open access improves the dissemination of science: insights from Wikipedia

Quotebank: A Corpus of Quotations from a Decade of News

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

Making Reasoning Matter: Measuring and Improving Faithfulness of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Crosslingual Topic Modeling with WikiPDA

Activation Scaling for Steering and Interpreting Language Models

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia (Part 2)

Efficient Entity Candidate Generation for Low-Resource Languages

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia. (Part 1)

Language Model Decoding as Likelihood–Utility Alignment

Prevalence and Prevention of Large Language Model Use in Crowd Work

Laughing Heads: Can Transformers Detect What Makes a Sentence Funny?

A Critical Re-evaluation of Neural Methods for Entity Alignment