Publications related to Fact-checking

Synthetic Disinformation Attacks on Automated Fact Verification Systems

Automated fact-checking is a needed technology to curtail the spread of online misinformation. One current framework for such solutions proposes to verify claims by retrieving supporting or refuting evidence from related textual sources. However, the reali ...

ASSOC ADVANCEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE2022

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

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

Implicit Bias of SGD for Diagonal Linear Networks: a Provable Benefit of Stochasticity

Nicolas Henri Bernard Flammarion, Scott William Pesme, Loucas Pillaud-Vivien

Understanding the implicit bias of training algorithms is of crucial importance in order to explain the success of overparametrised neural networks. In this paper, we study the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent over diagonal linear networks through i ...

2021

SciClops: Detecting and Contextualizing Scientific Claims for Assisting Manual Fact-Checking

Karl Aberer, Panagiotis Smeros, Carlos Castillo

This paper describes SciClops, a method to help combat online scientific misinformation. Although automated fact-checking methods have gained significant attention recently, they require pre-existing ground-truth evidence, which, in the scientific context, ...

ACM2021

Using “proof of personhood” to tackle social media risks

Bryan Alexander Ford

The ease of creating fake virtual identities plays an important role in shaping the way information — and misinformation — circulates online. Social media platforms are increasingly prominent in shaping public debates, and the tension between online anonym ...

International Risk Governance Center (IRGC)2021

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

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

Effort-driven Fact Checking

Thành Tâm Nguyên

The Web constitutes a valuable source of information. In recent years, it fostered the construction of large-scale knowledge bases, such as Freebase, YAGO, and DBpedia, each storing millions of facts about society in general, and specific domains, such as ...

2019

A dashboard for controlling polarization in personalization

Nisheeth Vishnoi, Farnood Salehi, Laura Elisa Celis, Vijay Keswani, Sayash Kapoor

Personalization is pervasive in the online space as it leads to higher efficiency for the user and higher revenue for the platform by individualizing the most relevant content for each user. However, recent studies suggest that such personalization can lea ...

IOS PRESS2019

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

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

A :) Is Worth a Thousand Words: How People Attach Sentiment to Emoticons and Words in Tweets

Boi Faltings, Pearl Pu Faltings, Claudiu-Cristian Musat, Marina Boia

Emoticons are widely used to express positive or negative sentiment on Twitter. We report on a study with live users to determine whether emoticons are used to merely emphasize the sentiment of tweets, or whether they are the main elements carrying the sen ...

IEEE2013