Keynotes


Preslav Nakov
Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), HBKU


Detecting the "Fake News" Before It Was Even Written, Media Literacy, and the COVID-19 Infodemic

Given the recent proliferation of disinformation online, there has been growing research interest in automatically debunking rumors, false claims, and "fake news". A number of fact-checking initiatives have been launched so far, both manual and automatic, but the whole enterprise remains in a state of crisis: by the time a claim is finally fact-checked, it could have reached millions of users, and the harm caused could hardly be undone.
An arguably more promising direction is to focus on analyzing entire news outlets, which can be done in advance; then, we could fact-check the news before it was even written: by checking how trustworthy the outlet that has published it is (which is what journalists actually do). We will show how we do this in the Tanbih news aggregator (http://www.tanbih.org/), which aims to limit the impact of "fake news", propaganda and media bias by making users aware of what they are reading, thus promoting media literacy and critical thinking, which are arguably the best way to address disinformation in the long run. In particular, we develop media profiles that show the general factuality of reporting, the degree of propagandistic content, hyper-partisanship, leading political ideology, general frame of reporting, stance with respect to various claims and topics, as well as audience reach and audience bias in social media.
Another important observation is that the term "fake news" misleads people to focus exclusively on factuality, and to ignore the other half of the problem: the potential malicious intent. Thus, we detect the use of specific propaganda techniques in text, e.g., appeal to emotions, fear, prejudices, logical fallacies, etc. We will show how we do this in the Prta system (https://www.tanbih.org/prta), another media literacy tool, which got the Best Demo Award (Honorable Mention) at ACL-2020.
Finally, at the time of COVID-19, the problem of disinformation online got elevated to a whole new level as the first global infodemic. While fighting this infodemic is typically thought of in terms of factuality, the problem is much broader as malicious content includes not only "fake news", rumors, and conspiracy theories, but also promotion of fake cures, panic, racism, xenophobia, and mistrust in the authorities, among others. Thus, we argue for the need of a holistic approach combining the perspectives of journalists, fact-checkers, policymakers, social media platforms, and society as a whole, and we present our initial steps in that direction.


Bio: Dr. Preslav Nakov is a Principal Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), HBKU. His research interests include computational linguistics, disinformation, propaganda and bias detection, fact-checking, machine translation, question answering, sentiment analysis, lexical semantics, and biomedical text processing. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley (supported by a Fulbright grant), and he was a Research Fellow in the National University of Singapore, a honorary lecturer in the Sofia University, and research staff at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. At QCRI, he leads the Tanbih mega-project, developed in collaboration with MIT, which aims to limit the effect of "fake news", propaganda and media bias by making users aware of what they are reading, thus promoting media literacy and critical thinking. Dr. Nakov is President of ACL SIGLEX, Secretary of ACL SIGSLAV, and a member of the EACL advisory board. He is member of the editorial board of a number of journals including Computational Linguistics, TACL, CS&L, NLE, AI Communications, and Frontiers in AI. He is also on the Editorial Board of the Language Science Press Book Series on Phraseology and Multiword Expressions. He co-authored a Morgan & Claypool book on Semantic Relations between Nominals, two books on computer algorithms, and many research papers in top-tier conferences and journals. Dr. Nakov received the Young Researcher Award at RANLP'2011. He was also the first to receive the Bulgarian President's John Atanasoff award, named after the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer. Dr. Nakov's research was featured by over 100 news outlets, including Forbes, Boston Globe, Aljazeera, DefenseOne, Business Insider, MIT Technology Review, Science Daily, Popular Science, Fast Company, The Register, WIRED, and Engadget, among others.

Damiano Spina
RMIT University, Melbourne


Assisting Fact-Checking Experts with Information Access Tools

As the information that is generated and shared across different channels grows exponentially, so does the amount of misleading, incomplete, or inaccurate information that needs to be verified. As fact-checking organisations face the problem of scaling to meet this demand, information access and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools bring opportunities to assist experts during the fact-checking process. However, how to effectively incorporate these tools into the fact-checking process remains yet a challenge. In this talk I will present recent and ongoing work in collaboration with fact-checking experts to better understand how information access solutions can be incorporated into the process of targeting, identifying and delivering fact-checked information.

Bio: Dr. Damiano Spina is a Lecturer and DECRA Fellow at RMIT University, School of Science (Computer Science and IT discipline). Dr. Spina is member of the RMIT Research Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics (CIDDA) and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His research expertise is in the field of Information Retrieval (IR) and Text Analytics. In particular, his research focuses on interactive information retrieval and evaluation of information access systems. Dr. Spina completed his PhD in Computer Science in (2014, UNED, Spain). Previously, he received a M.S. in Language Technologies on the Web (2011, UNED, Spain) and a Bs.D. in Computer Science (2008, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain). He has published more than 40 peer-reviewed scientific publications, including papers at conferences such as SIGIR, ECIR, CIKM, CHIIR, and CLEF, and journals such as IP&M, and JASIST. He co-organised two editions of the workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval (CAIR'20 at CHIIR'20, CAIR'18 at SIGIR'18) and the two editions of the workshop on Real-time Analysis and Mining of Social Streams (RAMSS´12 at ICWSM-12, RAMSS'13 at WWW'13). He serves as editorial board member for IP&M and Information journals. During his research career, Dr. Spina has collaborated with colleagues in different industry organisations such as Microsoft, Google, SEEK, RMIT ABC Fact Check, Real Thing, Inference Solutions, Abbrevi8, and Llorente&Cuenca. Besides his academic life, Damiano plays and teaches Capoeira (an Afro-Braszilian martial art) and plays Samba at the Melbourne-based band Wombatuque.