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With the current shift in the mass media landscape from journalistic rigor to social media, personalized social media is becoming the new norm. Although the digitalization progress of the media brings many advantages, it also increases the risk of spreading disinformation, misinformation, and malformation through the use of fake news. The emergence of this harmful phenomenon has managed to polarize society and manipulate public opinion on particular topics, e.g., elections, vaccinations, etc. Such information propagated on social media can distort public perceptions and generate social unrest while lacking the rigor of traditional journalism. Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques are essential for developing efficient tools that can detect fake news. Models that use the context of textual data are essential for resolving the fake news detection problem, as they manage to encode linguistic features within the vector representation of words. In this paper, we propose a new approach that uses document embeddings to build multiple models that accurately label news articles as reliable or fake. We also present a benchmark on different architectures that detect fake news using binary or multi-labeled classification. We evaluated the models on five large news corpora using accuracy, precision, and recall. We obtained better results than more complex state-of-the-art Deep Neural Network models. We observe that the most important factor for obtaining high accuracy is the document encoding, not the classification model's complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water resource management represents a fundamental aspect of a modern society. Urban areas present multiple challenges requiring complex solutions, which include multidomain approaches related to the integration of advanced technologies. Water consumption monitoring applications play a significant role in increasing awareness, while machine learning has been proven for the design of intelligent solutions in this field. This paper presents an approach for monitoring and predicting water consumption from the most important water outlets in a household based on a proposed IoT solution. Data processing pipelines were defined, including K-means clustering and evaluation metrics, extracting consumption events, and training classification methods for predicting consumption sources. Continuous water consumption monitoring offers multiple benefits toward improving decision support by combining modern processing techniques, algorithms, and methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing artificial learning systems that can understand and generate natural language has been one of the long-standing goals of artificial intelligence. Recent decades have witnessed an impressive progress on both of these problems, giving rise to a new family of approaches. Especially, the advances in deep learning over the past couple of years have led to neural approaches to natural language generation (NLG). These methods combine generative language learning techniques with neural-networks based frameworks. With a wide range of applications in natural language processing, neural NLG (NNLG) is a new and fast growing field of research. In this state-of-the-art report, we investigate the recent developments and applications of NNLG in its full extent from a multidimensional view, covering critical perspectives such as multimodality, multilinguality, controllability and learning strategies. We summarize the fundamental building blocks of NNLG approaches from these aspects and provide detailed reviews of commonly used preprocessing steps and basic neural architectures. This report also focuses on the seminal applications of these NNLG models such as machine translation, description generation, automatic speech recognition, abstractive summarization, text simplification, question answering and generation, and dialogue generation. Finally, we conclude with a thorough discussion of the described frameworks by pointing out some open research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extracting top-k keywords and documents using weighting schemes are popular techniques employed in text mining and machine learning for different analysis and retrieval tasks. The weights are usually computed in the data preprocessing step, as they are costly to update and keep track of all the modifications performed on the dataset. Furthermore, calculation errors are introduced when analyzing only subsets of the dataset, i.e., wrong weighting are computed as weighting schemes use the number of documents for scoring keywords and documents. Therefore, in a Big Data context, it is crucial to lower the runtime of computing weighting schemes, without hindering the analysis process and the accuracy of the machine learning algorithms. To address this requirement for the task of computing top-k keywords and documents (which largely relies on weighting schemes), it is customary to design benchmarks that compare weighting schemes within various configurations of distributedframeworks and database management systems. Thus, we propose TextBenDS - a generic document-oriented benchmark for storing textual data and constructing weighting schemes. Our benchmark offers a generic data model designed with a multidimensional approach for storing text documents. We also propose using aggregation queries with various complexities and selectivities for constructing term weighting schemes, that are utilized in extracting top-k keywords and documents. We evaluate the computing performance of the queries on several distributed environments set within the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. Our experimental results provide interesting insights. As an example, MongoDB shows the best overall performance, while Spark's execution time remains almost constant regardless of weighting schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the exponential growth of the Internet of Things networks and the massive amount of time series data collected from these networks, it is essential to apply efficient methods for Big Data analysis in order to extract meaningful information and statistics. Anomaly detection is an important part of time series analysis, improving the quality of further analysis, such as prediction and forecasting. Thus, detecting sudden change points with normal behavior and using them to discriminate between abnormal behavior, i.e., outliers, is a crucial step used to minimize the false positive rate and to build accurate machine learning models for prediction and forecasting. In this paper, we propose a rule-based decision system that enhances anomaly detection in multivariate time series using change point detection. Our architecture uses a pipeline that automatically manages to detect real anomalies and remove the false positives introduced by change points. We employ both traditional and deep learning unsupervised algorithms, in total, five anomaly detection and five change point detection algorithms. Additionally, we propose a new confidence metric based on the support for a time series point to be an anomaly and the support for the same point to be a change point. In our experiments, we use a large real-world dataset containing multivariate time series about water consumption collected from smart meters. As an evaluation metric, we use Mean Absolute Error (MAE). The low MAE values show that the algorithms accurately determine anomalies and change points. The experimental results strengthen our assumption that anomaly detection can be improved by determining and removing change points as well as validates the correctness of our proposed rules in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed rule-based decision support systems enable users to make informed decisions regarding the status of the water distribution network and perform effectively predictive and proactive maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water distribution is fundamental to modern society, and there are many associated challenges in the context of large metropolitan areas. A multi-domain approach is required for designing modern solutions for the existing infrastructure, including control and monitoring systems, data science and Machine Learning. Considering the large scale water distribution networks in metropolitan areas, machine and deep learning algorithms can provide improved adaptability for control applications. This paper presents a monitoring and control machine learning-based architecture for a smart water distribution system. Automated test scenarios and learning methods are proposed and designed to predict the network configuration for a modern implementation of a multiple model control supervisor with increased adaptability to changing operating conditions. The high-level processing and components for smart water distribution systems are supported by the smart meters, providing real-time data, push-based and decoupled software architectures and reactive programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]