Predicting the political bias and the factuality of reporting of entire news outlets are critical elements of media profiling, which is an understudied but an increasingly important research direction. The present level of proliferation of fake, biased, and propagandistic content online, has made it impossible to fact-check every single suspicious claim, either manually or automatically. Alternatively, we can profile entire news outlets and look for those that are likely to publish fake or biased content. This approach makes it possible to detect likely "fake news" the moment they are published, by simply checking the reliability of their source. From a practical perspective, political bias and factuality of reporting have a linguistic aspect but also a social context. Here, we study the impact of both, namely (i) what was written (i.e., what was published by the target medium, and how it describes itself on Twitter) vs. (ii) who read it (i.e., analyzing the readers of the target medium on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube). We further study (iii) what was written about the target medium on Wikipedia. The evaluation results show that what was written matters most, and that putting all information sources together yields huge improvements over the current state-of-the-art.
PRHLT Research Center, Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学PRHLT研究中心）；University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）
We present an approach to detect fake news in Twitter at the account level using a neural recurrent model and a variety of different semantic and stylistic features. Our method extracts a set of features from the timelines of news Twitter accounts by reading their posts as chunks, rather than dealing with each tweet independently. We show the experimental benefits of modeling latent stylistic signatures of mixed fake and real news with a sequential model over a wide range of strong baselines.
Sofia University（索非亚大学）；TIET；QCRI, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
We study the problem of profiling news media on the Web with respect to their factuality of reporting and bias. This is an important but under-studied problem related to disinformation and "fake news" detection, but it addresses the issue at a coarser granularity compared to looking at an individual article or an individual claim. This is useful as it allows to profile entire media outlets in advance. Unlike previous work, which has focused primarily on text (e.g.,~on the text of the articles published by the target website, or on the textual description in their social media profiles or in Wi…
We propose to leverage news discourse profiling to model document-level temporal structures for building temporal dependency graphs. Our key observation is that the functional roles of sentences used for profiling news discourse signify different time frames relevant to a news story and can, therefore, help to recover the global temporal structure of a document. Our analyses and experiments with the widely used knowledge distillation technique show that discourse profiling effectively identifies distant inter-sentence event and (or) time expression pairs that are temporally related and otherwi…
Automatic news comment generation is a new testbed for techniques of natural language generation. In this paper, we propose a "read-attend-comment" procedure for news comment generation and formalize the procedure with a reading network and a generation network. The reading network comprehends a news article and distills some important points from it, then the generation network creates a comment by attending to the extracted discrete points and the news title. We optimize the model in an end-to-end manner by maximizing a variational lower bound of the true objective using the back-propagation…
University of Turin（都灵大学）；University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）
Since their announcement in November 2020, COVID-19 vaccines were largely debated by the press and social media. With most studies focusing on COVID-19 disinformation in social media, little attention has been paid to how mainstream news outlets framed COVID-19 narratives compared to alternative sources. To fill this gap, we use cognitive network science and natural language processing to reconstruct time-evolving semantic and emotional frames of 5745 Italian news, that were massively re-shared on Facebook and Twitter, about COVID-19 vaccines. We found consistently high levels of trust/anticip…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔 computing 研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
The present level of proliferation of fake, biased, and propagandistic content online has made it impossible to fact-check every single suspicious claim or article, either manually or automatically. Thus, many researchers are shifting their attention to higher granularity, aiming to profile entire news outlets, which makes it possible to detect likely "fake news" the moment it is published, by simply checking the reliability of its source. Source factuality is also an important element of systems for automatic fact-checking and "fake news" detection, as they need to assess the reliability of t…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
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 be…
A common method for extractive multi-document news summarization is to re-formulate it as a single-document summarization problem by concatenating all documents as a single meta-document. However, this method neglects the relative importance of documents. We propose a simple approach to reorder the documents according to their relative importance before concatenating and summarizing them. The reordering makes the salient content easier to learn by the summarization model. Experiments show that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods with more complex architectures.
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；Sofia University（索非亚大学）；University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）；SiteGround Hosting EOOD；MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
We introduce Tanbih, a news aggregator with intelligent analysis tools to help readers understanding what's behind a news story. Our system displays news grouped into events and generates media profiles that show the general factuality of reporting, the degree of propagandistic content, hyper-partisanship, leading political ideology, general frame of reporting, and stance with respect to various claims and topics of a news outlet. In addition, we automatically analyse each article to detect whether it is propagandistic and to determine its stance with respect to a number of controversial topic…
Times Internet Limited（Times Internet有限公司）；Birla Institute of Technology & Science Pilani（比尔拉理工学院皮拉尼分校）
In this era of digitisation, news reader tend to read news online. This is because, online media instantly provides access to a wide variety of content. Thus, people don't have to wait for tomorrow's newspaper to know what's happening today. Along with these virtues, online news have some vices as well. One such vice is presence of social media posts (tweets) relating to news articles whose sole purpose is to draw attention of the users rather than directing them to read the actual content. Such posts are referred to as clickbaits. The objective of this project is to develop a system which wou…
Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；Autoritas Consulting（奥里塔斯咨询公司）
Fake news is risky since it has been created to manipulate the readers' opinions and beliefs. In this work, we compared the language of false news to the real one of real news from an emotional perspective, considering a set of false information types (propaganda, hoax, clickbait, and satire) from social media and online news articles sources. Our experiments showed that false information has different emotional patterns in each of its types, and emotions play a key role in deceiving the reader. Based on that, we proposed a LSTM neural network model that is emotionally-infused to detect false …
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology - Delhi（德里英迪拉普拉斯信息技术学院）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI（综合研究大学院大学）；University of Tokyo（东京大学）
Recent advancements in natural language generation has raised serious concerns. High-performance language models are widely used for language generation tasks because they are able to produce fluent and meaningful sentences. These models are already being used to create fake news. They can also be exploited to generate biased news, which can then be used to attack news aggregators to change their reader's behavior and influence their bias. In this paper, we use a threat model to demonstrate that the publicly available language models can reliably generate biased news content based on an input …
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（国际信息技术研究所（海得拉巴））
Newspapers are a popular form of written discourse, read by many people, thanks to the novelty of the information provided by the news content in it. A headline is the most widely read part of any newspaper due to its appearance in a bigger font and sometimes in colour print. In this paper, we suggest and implement a method for computing inferences from English news headlines, excluding the information from the context in which the headlines appear. This method attempts to generate the possible assumptions a reader formulates in mind upon reading a fresh headline. The generated inferences coul…
Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）；Symanto Research（Symanto研究公司）
Fake news articles often stir the readers' attention by means of emotional appeals that arouse their feelings. Unlike in short news texts, authors of longer articles can exploit such affective factors to manipulate readers by adding exaggerations or fabricating events, in order to affect the readers' emotions. To capture this, we propose in this paper to model the flow of affective information in fake news articles using a neural architecture. The proposed model, FakeFlow, learns this flow by combining topic and affective information extracted from text. We evaluate the model's performance wit…
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”（圣克莱门特·奥里季斯基索非亚大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所（哈马德·本·哈利法大学））
It is completely amazing! Fake news and click-baits have totally invaded the cyber space. Let us face it: everybody hates them for three simple reasons. Reason #2 will absolutely amaze you. What these can achieve at the time of election will completely blow your mind! Now, we all agree, this cannot go on, you know, somebody has to stop it. So, we did this research on fake news/click-bait detection and trust us, it is totally great research, it really is! Make no mistake. This is the best research ever! Seriously, come have a look, we have it all: neural networks, attention mechanism, sentiment…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Automation and Systems Research Institute（自动化与系统研究所）；Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；Institute for Basic Science（基础科学研究所）
Some news headlines mislead readers with overrated or false information, and identifying them in advance will better assist readers in choosing proper news stories to consume. This research introduces million-scale pairs of news headline and body text dataset with incongruity label, which can uniquely be utilized for detecting news stories with misleading headlines. On this dataset, we develop two neural networks with hierarchical architectures that model a complex textual representation of news articles and measure the incongruity between the headline and the body text. We also present a data…
Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT（弗劳恩霍夫安全信息技术研究所）
The authors of fake news often use facts from verified news sources and mix them with misinformation to create confusion and provoke unrest among the readers. The spread of fake news can thereby have serious implications on our society. They can sway political elections, push down the stock price or crush reputations of corporations or public figures. Several websites have taken on the mission of checking rumors and allegations, but are often not fast enough to check the content of all the news being disseminated. Especially social media websites have offered an easy platform for the fast prop…
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（印度海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
A corpus of Hindi news headlines shared on Twitter was created by collecting tweets of 5 mainstream Hindi news sources for a period of 4 months. 7 independent annotators were recruited to mark the 20 most retweeted news posts by each of the 5 news sources on its clickbait nature. The clickbait score hence generated was assessed for its correlation with interactions on the platform (retweets, favorites, reader replies), tweet word count, and normalized POS (part-of-speech) tag counts in tweets. A positive correlation was observed between readers' interactions with tweets and tweets' clickbait s…
The problem of fake news has gained a lot of attention as it is claimed to have had a significant impact on 2016 US Presidential Elections. Fake news is not a new problem and its spread in social networks is well-studied. Often an underlying assumption in fake news discussion is that it is written to look like real news, fooling the reader who does not check for reliability of the sources or the arguments in its content. Through a unique study of three data sets and features that capture the style and the language of articles, we show that this assumption is not true. Fake news in most cases i…
Read Between the Lines: A Benchmark for Uncovering Political Bias in Bangla News Articles
University of Dhaka（达卡大学）；University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）；Cisco Systems（思科系统）；BanglaLLM；Maharishi International University（玛哈里希国际大学）；Unityflow AI
Fake news is a type of pervasive propaganda that spreads misinformation online, taking advantage of social media's extensive reach to manipulate public perception. Over the past three years, fake news has become a focal discussion point in the media due to its impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Fake news can have severe real-world implications: in 2016, a man walked into a pizzeria carrying a rifle because he read that Hillary Clinton was harboring children as sex slaves. This project presents a high accuracy (87%) machine learning classifier that determines the validity of news ba…
This work describes an automatic news chatbot that draws content from a diverse set of news articles and creates conversations with a user about the news. Key components of the system include the automatic organization of news articles into topical chatrooms, integration of automatically generated questions into the conversation, and a novel method for choosing which questions to present which avoids repetitive suggestions. We describe the algorithmic framework and present the results of a usability study that shows that news readers using the system successfully engage in multi-turn conversat…
A Multi-View Media Profiling Suite: Resources, Evaluation, and Analysis
MBZUAI（穆巴扎人工智能研究院）；Interdisciplinary Transformation University（跨学科转型大学）；University of Texas at San Antonio, USA（德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校）；University of Copenhagen, Denmark（哥本哈根大学）
Effective detection of fake news has recently attracted significant attention. Current studies have made significant contributions to predicting fake news with less focus on exploiting the relationship (similarity) between the textual and visual information in news articles. Attaching importance to such similarity helps identify fake news stories that, for example, attempt to use irrelevant images to attract readers' attention. In this work, we propose a $\mathsf{S}$imilarity-$\mathsf{A}$ware $\mathsf{F}$ak$\mathsf{E}$ news detection method ($\mathsf{SAFE}$) which investigates multi-modal (tex…
This study investigates how fake news uses a thumbnail for a news article with a focus on whether a news article's thumbnail represents the news content correctly. A news article shared with an irrelevant thumbnail can mislead readers into having a wrong impression of the issue, especially in social media environments where users are less likely to click the link and consume the entire content. We propose to capture the degree of semantic incongruity in the multimodal relation by using the pretrained CLIP representation. From a source-level analysis, we found that fake news employs a more inco…
Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院智能信息处理重点实验室）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Fake news detection is crucial for preventing the dissemination of misinformation on social media. To differentiate fake news from real ones, existing methods observe the language patterns of the news post and "zoom in" to verify its content with knowledge sources or check its readers' replies. However, these methods neglect the information in the external news environment where a fake news post is created and disseminated. The news environment represents recent mainstream media opinion and public attention, which is an important inspiration of fake news fabrication because fake news is often …
