Ritwik Banerjee

Stony Brook University | Stony Brook · Department of Computer Science

Ubiquitous communication on social media has led to a rapid increase in the proliferation of unreliable information. Its ill-effects have perhaps been seen most obviously during the COVID-19 pandemic, and have rightfully raised concerns about the integrity of shared information. This work focuses on derivative Twitter posts (tweets), i.e., posts th...

With the spread of the SARS-CoV-2, enormous amounts of information about the pandemic are disseminated through social media platforms such as Twitter. Social media posts often leverage the trust readers have in prestigious news agencies and cite news articles as a way of gaining credibility. Nevertheless, it is not always the case that the cited ar...

Natural language undergoes significant transformation from the domain of specialized research to general news intended for wider consumption. This transition makes the information vulnerable to misinterpretation, misrepresentation, and incorrect attribution, all of which may be difficult to identify without adequate domain knowledge and may exist e...

As the spread of information has received a compelling boost due to pervasive use of social media, so has the spread of misinformation. The sheer volume of data has rendered the traditional methods of expert-driven manual fact-checking largely infeasible. As a result, computational linguistics and data-driven algorithms have been explored in recent...

Adverse drug events (ADEs) trigger a high number of hospital emergency room (ER) visits. Information about ADEs is often available in online drug databases in the form of narrative texts, and serves as the physician's primary reference point for ADE attribution and diagnosis. Manually reviewing these narratives, however, is an error prone and time...

Understanding network reliability and outages is critical to the "health" of the Internet infrastructure. Unfortunately, our ability to analyze Internet outages has been hampered by the lack of access to public information from key players. In this paper, we leverage a somewhat unconventional dataset to analyze Internet reliability—the outages mail...

Adverse drug events (ADE) caused by use, misuse or sudden discontinuation of medications trigger hospital emergency room visits. Information about a wide range of drugs and associated ADEs is provided in online drug databases in the form of narrative texts. Even though some ADEs can be detected by observable symptoms, several others can only be con...

Much of the writing styles recognized in rhetorical and composition theories involve deep syntactic elements. However, most previous research for computational stylometric analysis has relied on shallow lexico-syntactic patterns. Some very recent work has shown that PCFG models can detect distributional difference in syntactic styles, but without o...

Most previous studies in computerized deception detection have relied only on shallow lexico-syntactic patterns. This paper investigates syntactic stylometry for deception detection, adding a somewhat unconventional angle to prior literature. Over four different datasets spanning from the product review to the essay domain, we demonstrate that feat...