Seminar
MATHEMATICAL FOUNDATIONS OF INFORMATICS

The next meeting of the seminar organized by the Department of Mathematical Foundations of Informatics, IMI – BAS, and the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of the Veliko Tarnovo University will be held on July 5, 2018, at 15:30 in John Atanassoff Auditorium (102) of VTU.

A talk will be delivered on:

Truth-Seeking in the Age of Disinformation

by Preslav Nakov, Senior Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute.

Everybody is invited.

Abstract. Given the constantly growing proliferation of false claims online in recent years, there has been also a growing research interest in automatically distinguishing false rumors from factually-true claims. In this talk, I will present several related problems. First, in the context of investigative journalism, I will address the problem of automatically identifying which claims in a political debate are most worthy and should be prioritized for fact-checking (QCRI’s ClaimRank tool: http://claimrank.qcri.org/). I will then present a general-purpose deep learning framework for fully-automatic fact-checking using external sources, which taps the potential of the entire Web as a knowledge source to confirm or reject a claim. I will further extend this framework to the context of community question answering, where the goal is to decide whether an answer to a factual question is factually true or false. I will also describe an application of this framework to the problem of fake news and clickbait detection, presenting the architecture of a system that won the 2017 hackaton on this problem, organized by the Data Science Society. I will further cover some related problems such as stance detection, news source reliability, bias and propaganda detection, as well as finding seminar users and opinion manipulation trolls in news community fora.