Dr. Preslav I. Nakov - Principal Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), HBKU Digital Security
Date: - Location: Eurecom
Title: Detecting the "Fake News" Before They Were Even Written Abstract: 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 before they were even written: by checking how trustworthy the outlets that published them are. We will show how we do this in the Tanbih news aggregator (http://www.tanbih.org/), which makes readers aware of what they are reading. In particular, we develop media profiles that show the general factuality of reporting, the degree of propagandistic content, hyper-partisanship, leading political ideology, general frame of reporting, stance with respect to various claims and topics, as well as audience reach and audience bias in social media. Biography: Dr. Preslav Nakov is a Principal Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), HBKU. His research interests include computational linguistics, "fake news" detection, fact-checking, machine translation, question answering, sentiment analysis, lexical semantics, Web as a corpus, and biomedical text processing. At QCRI, he leads the Tanbih project (http://tanbih.qcri.org), developed in collaboration with MIT, which aims to limit the effect of "fake news", propaganda and media bias by making users aware of what they are reading. Dr. Nakov is the Secretary of ACL SIGLEX and ACL SIGSLAV, and a member of the EACL advisory board. He also serves on the editorial boards of the Journals of Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Computer Speech and Language, Natural Language Engineering, AI Communications, and Frontiers in AI. Dr. Nakov received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley (supported by a Fulbright grant). He is the recipient of the Bulgarian President's John Atanasoff award, named after the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer.
