I gave a keynote talk at “Bias & Misinformation” workshop at SocInfo 2019 that is held in Doha. The talk was titled “FakeDet: Research on Fake News Detection at Qatar University” and discussed research work and initiatives at Qatar University on that topic.
Abstract: Fake news becomes ubiquitous; therefore combating it becomes mandatory. In this talk, I will present research efforts and initiatives that we started recently at Qatar University to tackle the problem of fake news detection and fact checking, especially in Arabic. I will start with our work on re-ranking Web search results for better fact checking that studies how good current search engines are for finding pages that are useful in verifying given claims. I will then discuss our CheckThat! lab initiative that we co-organize at CLEF Conference for 3 years in a row. CheckThat! aims at supporting investigative journalists and volunteers for finding check-worthy claims and identifying evidence to verify those claims. Since verifying news might need “context”, I will also present very recent work on finding background articles that can help news-readers conceptualize the story of a given news article with more knowledge. Finally, I will briefly introduce and outline our new QNRF-supported project on fake news detection over Arabic social media in collaboration with University of Edinburgh and AlJazeera Network.
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