Detecting the Fake News at Its Source, Media Literacy, and Regulatory Compliance

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                Joint Seminar
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The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Human Language Technology Center
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Speaker:        Dr. Preslav Nakov
                Principal Scientist
                Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), HBKU

Title:          "Detecting the Fake News at Its Source, Media Literacy,
                 and Regulatory Compliance"

Date:           Friday, 8 November 2019

Time:           2:00pm - 3:00pm

Venue:          Room 3520 (via lift 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Given the recent proliferation of disinformation online, there has been
also 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
fact-checking entire news outlets, which can be done in advance. Then, we
could fact-check the news before they were even written: by checking how
trustworthy the outlets that published them are.

We will show how we do this in the Tanbih news aggregator
(http://www.tanbih.org/), which aims to limit the effect of "fake news",
propaganda and media bias by making users aware of what they are reading.
The project's primary aim is to promote media literacy and critical
thinking, which are arguably the best way to address disinformation and
"fake news" 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. We further offer
explainability by automatically detecting and highlighting the instances
of use of specific propaganda techniques in the news
(https://www.tanbih.org/propaganda).

Finally, we will show how this research can support broadcasters and
content owners with their regulatory measures and compliance processes.
This is a direction we recently explored as part of our TM Forum & IBC
2019 award-winning Media-Telecom Catalyst project on AI Indexing for
Regulatory Compliance, which QCRI developed in partnership with Al
Jazeera, Associated Press, RTE Ireland, Tech Mahindra, V-Nova, and
Metaliquid.


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Biography:

Dr. Preslav Nakov is a Principal Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research
Institute (QCRI), HBKU. His research interests include computational
linguistics, "fake news" detection, fact-checking, machine translation,
question answering, sentiment analysis, lexical semantics, Web as a
corpus, and biomedical text processing. He received his PhD degree 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 project
(http://tanbih.qcri.org), 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. Dr. Nakov is the Secretary of ACL
SIGLEX and of ACL SIGSLAV, and a member of the EACL advisory board. He is
member of the editorial board of TACL, C&SL, 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.