Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Message Distortion in Information Cascades   Information diffusion is usually modeled as a process in which immutable
pieces of information propagate over a network. In reality, however, messages
are not immutable, but may be morphed with every step, potentially entailing
large cumulative distortions. This process may lead to misinformation even in
the absence of malevolent actors, and understanding it is crucial for modeling
and improving online information systems. Here, we perform a controlled,
crowdsourced experiment in which we simulate the propagation of information
from medical research papers. Starting from the original abstracts, crowd
workers iteratively shorten previously produced summaries to increasingly
smaller lengths. We also collect control summaries where the original abstract
is compressed directly to the final target length. Comparing cascades to
controls allows us to separate the effect of the length constraint from that of
accumulated distortion. Via careful manual coding, we annotate lexical and
semantic units in the medical abstracts and track them along cascades. We find
that iterative summarization has a negative impact due to the accumulation of
error, but that high-quality intermediate summaries result in less distorted
messages than in the control case. Different types of information behave
differently; in particular, the conclusion of a medical abstract (i.e., its key
message) is distorted most. Finally, we compare abstractive with extractive
summaries, finding that the latter are less prone to semantic distortion.
Overall, this work is a first step in studying information cascades without the
assumption that disseminated content is immutable, with implications on our
understanding of the role of word-of-mouth effects on the misreporting of
science.

23
The categories of this paper are: solv-int
12
The categories of this paper are: nucl-th
11
The categories of this paper are: hep-lat
34
The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
27
The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
9
The categories of this paper are: nlin
26
The categories of this paper are: bayes-an
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The categories of this paper are: adap-org
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The categories of this paper are: supr-con
5
The categories of this paper are: gr-qc
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The categories of this paper are: hep-th
4
The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
30
The categories of this paper are: q-alg
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The categories of this paper are: econ
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
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The categories of this paper are: acc-phys