NAVER LABS Europe seminars are open to the public. This seminar is virtual and requires registration
Date: 8th March 2022, 10:00 am (GMT +1)
Flagging suspect publications and crowdsourcing post-publication reassessments: the ‘Problematic Paper Screener’
Abstract: Probabilistic text generators have been used to produce fake scientific papers for more than a decade. Now more complex AI-powered generation techniques produce texts indistinguishable from that of humans and the generation of scientific texts starting from a few keywords used as input has been documented. Our study introduces the concept of tortured phrases: unexpected weird phrases in lieu of established ones, such as ‘counterfeit consciousness’ instead of ‘artificial intelligence.’ Hypothesising the use of advanced language models we ran a detector on the abstracts of recent articles and on several control sets.
About the Speakers: Cyril Labbé received a PhD in computer science and a MS in applied mathematics from University of Grenoble. He is a tenured associate professor in computer science since 2001 and at the head of the Information Systems research team (Sigma-team) at the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory, France. His research interests include large scale data management and text analysis. His work on text-mining and automatic detection of bogus scientific paper, has led to retractions or withdrawals several hundreds of computer science and bio-medical publications. He created the “SCIgen detection” and “Seek&Blastn” softwares, participated to the “Problematic Paper Screener” website and did also create Ike Antkare, a fictitious scientist, that had once (dixit Google Scholar) an astonishing h-index.
Guillaume Cabanac is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toulouse, France. He holds a PhD (2008) and a habilitation degree (2016) from the University of Toulouse. His interdisciplinary research on the quantitative study of science is at the crossroads between Information Retrieval, Digital Libraries, and Scientometrics. He serves on the editorial boards of Scientometrics and the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). His current work on the Problematic Paper Screener contributes to the identification and reporting of algorithmically generated and fraudulent papers published—often sold—by academic publishers. Cabanac was nicknamed ‘Deception sleuth’ in the Nature’s 10 listicle of ‘ten people who helped shape science in 2021.’