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Robert West

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Related publications (64)

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An Ordinal Latent Variable Model of Conflict Intensity

Robert West

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 ...

Assoc Computational Linguistics-Acl2023

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

Robert West, Manoel Horta Ribeiro

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 ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2023

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

Robert West

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 ...

ASSOC ADVANCEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE2019

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

Robert West, Kristina Gligoric

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 ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2023

Wikipedia Reader Navigation: When Synthetic Data Is Enough

Robert West, Tiziano Piccardi, Akhil Arora, Alberto Garcia Duran

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 ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022

REFINER: Reasoning Feedback on Intermediate Representations

Boi Faltings, Robert West, Antoine Bosselut, Maxime Jean Julien Peyrard, Debjit Paul, Mahammad Ismayilzada, Beatriz Maria Borges Ribeiro

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 ...

2023

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia. (Part 3)

Robert West, Tiziano Piccardi

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 ...

RUSSIAN NATL PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY2020

On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4

Francesco Salvi, Robert West

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 ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2025

Open access improves the dissemination of science: insights from Wikipedia

Robert West

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 ...

2024

Quotebank: A Corpus of Quotations from a Decade of News

Robert West, Andreas Oliver Spitz

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 ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

Robert West, Giovanni Colavizza, Tiziano Piccardi

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

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

Boi Faltings, Robert West, Antoine Bosselut, Debjit Paul

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 ...

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)2024

Crosslingual Topic Modeling with WikiPDA

Robert West, Tiziano Piccardi

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 ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Activation Scaling for Steering and Interpreting Language Models

Robert West

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 ...

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)2024

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia (Part 2)

Robert West, Giovanni Colavizza, Tiziano Piccardi

RUSSIAN NATL PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY2020

Efficient Entity Candidate Generation for Low-Resource Languages

Robert West, Akhil Arora, Alberto Garcia Duran

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 ...

EUROPEAN LANGUAGE RESOURCES ASSOC-ELRA2022

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia. (Part 1)

Robert West, Tiziano Piccardi

RUSSIAN NATL PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY2020

Language Model Decoding as Likelihood–Utility Alignment

Frano Rajic, Jiheng Wei, Boi Faltings, Robert West, Maxime Jean Julien Peyrard, Debjit Paul, Valentin Hartmann, Martin Josifoski

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 ...

Assoc Computational Linguistics-Acl2023

Prevalence and Prevention of Large Language Model Use in Crowd Work

Robert West

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2025

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

Robert West, Maxime Jean Julien Peyrard, Kristina Gligoric, Beatriz Maria Borges Ribeiro

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 ...

International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization2021