Publications related to News media

It’s All Relative: Learning Interpretable Models for Scoring Subjective Bias in Documents from Pairwise Comparisons

Matthias Grossglauser, Aswin Suresh, Chi Hsuan Wu

We propose an interpretable model to score the subjective bias present in documents, based only on their textual content. Our model is trained on pairs of revisions of the same Wikipedia article, where one version is more biased than the other. Although pr ...

2024

United States politicians' tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns

Robert West, Andreas Oliver Spitz, Ahmad Abu-Akel

There is a widespread belief that the tone of political debate in the US has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued previous t ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Examining European Press Coverage of the Covid-19 No-Vax Movement: An NLP Framework

Daniel Gatica-Perez

This paper examines how the European press dealt with the no-vax reactions against the Covid-19 vaccine and the dis- and misinformation associated with this movement. Using a curated dataset of 1786 articles from 19 European newspapers on the anti-vaccine ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2023

Combating Online Scientific Misinformation

Panagiotis Smeros

The drastic shift towards digital communication in our mediasphere has caused a profound change in the production and consumption of information, which in turn has substantial implications on the social and political landscape. Misinformation, as a side ef ...

EPFL2022

How Did Europe's Press Cover Covid-19 Vaccination News? A Five-Country Analysis

Daniel Gatica-Perez

Understanding how high-quality newspapers present and discuss major news plays a role towards tackling disinformation, as it contributes to the characterization of the full ecosystem in which information circulates. In this paper, we present an analysis of ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2022

On Representation Learning for Scientific News Articles Using Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs

Karl Aberer, Angeliki Romanou, Panagiotis Smeros

In the era of misinformation and information inflation, the credibility assessment of the produced news is of the essence. However, fact-checking can be challenging considering the limited references presented in the news. This challenge can be transcended ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Postmortem memory of public figures in news and social media

Robert West

Deceased public figures are often said to live on in collective memory. We quantify this phenomenon by tracking mentions of 2,362 public figures in English-language online news and social media (Twitter) 1 y before and after death. We measure the sharp spi ...

National Academy of Sciences2021

SciLens News Platform: A System for Real-Time Evaluation of News Articles

Karl Aberer, Angeliki Romanou, Panagiotis Smeros, Carlos Castillo

We demonstrate the SciLens News Platform, a novel system for evaluating the quality of news articles. The SciLens News Platform automatically collects contextual information about news articles in real-time and provides quality indicators about their valid ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

Reports of the Workshops Held at the 2020 International Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Web and Social Media

Panagiotis Smeros, Jérémie Rappaz

The workshop program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Fourteenth International Conference on Web and Social Media was held June 8 to 20, 2020. The conference venue, which had originally been Atlanta, Georgia, USA, had to ...

AMER ASSOC ARTIFICIAL INTELL2020

Debunking Misinformation on the Web: Detection, Validation, and Visualisation

Thành Tâm Nguyên

Our modern society is struggling with an unprecedented amount of online misinformation, which does harm to democracy, economics, and cybersecurity. Journalism and politics have been impacted by misinformation on a global scale, with weakened public trust i ...

EPFL2019

SciLens: Evaluating the Quality of Scientific News Articles Using Social Media and Scientific Literature Indicators

Karl Aberer, Panagiotis Smeros, Carlos Castillo

This paper describes, develops, and validates SciLens, a method to evaluate the quality of scientific news articles. The starting point for our work are structured methodologies that define a series of quality aspects for manually evaluating news. Based on ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2019

The Fake News Vaccine

Rachid Guerraoui, Willy Zwaenepoel, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Alexandre David Olivier Maurer, Matej Pavlovic, Oana Maria Balmau

While spreading fake news is an old phenomenon, today social media enables misinformation to instantaneously reach millions of people. Content-based approaches to detect fake news, typically based on automatic text checking, are limited. It is indeed diffi ...

2019

Selection Bias in News Coverage: Learning it, Fighting it

Karl Aberer, Jérémie Rappaz

News entities must select and filter the coverage they broadcast through their respective channels since the set of world events is too large to be treated exhaustively. The subjective nature of this filtering induces biases due to, among other things, res ...

2018

Automatic Online Fake News Detection Combining Content and Social Signals

Stefano Moret, Gabriele Ballarin

The proliferation and rapid diffusion of fake news on the Internet highlight the need of automatic hoax detection systems. In the context of social networks, machine learning (ML) methods can be used for this purpose. Fake news detection strategies are tra ...

IEEE2018

Narrative Recomposition in the Context of Digital Reading

Cyril Antoine Michel Bornet

In any creative process, the tools one uses have an immediate influence on the shape of the final artwork. However, while the digital revolution has redefined core values in most creative domains over the last few decades, its impact on literature remains ...

EPFL2017

Effective models and numerical homogenization methods for long time wave propagation in heterogeneous media

Timothée Noé Pouchon

Modeling wave propagation in highly heterogeneous media is of prime importance in engineering applications of diverse nature such as seismic inversion, medical imaging or the design of composite materials. The numerical approximation of such multiscale phy ...

EPFL2017

Probing the Limits of Social Data : Biases, Methods, and Domain Knowledge

Alexandra Olteanu

Online social data has been hailed to provide unprecedented insights into human phenomena due to its ability to capture human behavior at a scale and level of detail, both in breadth and depth, that is hard to achieve through conventional data collection t ...

EPFL2016

Comparing Events Coverage in Online News and Social Media: The Case of Climate Change

Karl Aberer, Alexandra Olteanu, Carlos Castillo

Social media is becoming more and more integrated in the distribution and consumption of news. How is news in social media different from mainstream news? % This paper presents a comparative analysis covering a span of 17 months and hundreds of news events ...

2015

Mapping the Early Modern News Flow: An Enquiry by Robust Text Reuse Detection

Frédéric Kaplan, Giovanni Colavizza

Early modern printed gazettes relied on a system of news exchange and text reuse largely based on handwritten sources. The reconstruction of this information exchange system is possible by detecting reused texts. We present a method to individuate text bor ...

Springer International Publishing2015

WHATSUP: A Decentralized Instant News Recommender

Rachid Guerraoui, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Davide Frey

We present WhatsUp, a collaborative filtering system for disseminating news items in a large-scale dynamic setting with no central authority. WhatsUp constructs an implicit social network based on user profiles that express the opinions of users about the ...

2013