News articles generated by online media are a major source of information. In this work, we present News Monitor, a framework that automatically collects news articles from a wide variety of online news portals and performs various analysis tasks. The framework initially identifies fresh news (first stories) and clusters articles about the same incidents. For every story, at first, it extracts all of the corresponding triples and, then, it creates a knowledge base (KB) using open information extraction techniques. This knowledge base is then used to create a summary for the user. News Monitor allows for the users to use it as a search engine, ask their questions in their natural language and receive answers that have been created by the state-of-the-art framework BERT. In addition, News Monitor crawls the Twitter stream using a dynamic set of “trending” keywords in order to retrieve all messages relevant to the news. The framework is distributed, online and performs analysis in real-time. According to the evaluation results, the fake news detection techniques utilized by News Monitor allow for a F-measure of 82% in the rumor identification task and an accuracy of 92% in the stance detection tasks. The major contribution of this work can be summarized as a novel real-time and scalable architecture that combines various effective techniques under a news analysis framework.

The Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) is the number of infants per 1000 that do not survive until their first birthday. It is an important metric providing information about infant health but it also measures the society's general health status. Despite the high level of prosperity in the U.S.A., the country's IMR is higher than that of many other developed countries. Additionally, the U.S.A. exhibits persistent inequalities in the IMR across different racial and ethnic groups. In this paper, we study the infant mortality prediction using features extracted from birth certificates. We are interested in training classification models to decide whether an infant will survive or not. We focus on exploring and understanding the importance of features in subsets of the population; we compare models trained for individual races to general models. Our evaluation shows that our methodology outperforms standard classification methods used by epidemiology researchers.

The volume of news content has increased significantly in recent years and systems to process and deliver this information in an automated fashion at scale are becoming increasingly prevalent. One critical component that is required in such systems is a method to automatically determine how notable a certain news story is, in order to prioritize these stories during delivery. One way to do so is to compare each story in a stream of news stories to a notable event. In other words, the problem of detecting notable news can be defined as a ranking task; given a trusted source of notable events and a stream of candidate news stories, we aim to answer the question: "Which of the candidate news stories is most similar to the notable one?". We employ different combinations of features and learning to rank (LTR) models and gather relevance labels using crowdsourcing. In our approach, we use structured representations of candidate news stories (triples) and we link them to corresponding entities. Our evaluation shows that the features in our proposed method outperform standard ranking methods, and that the trained model generalizes well to unseen news stories.