Fake news is everywhere nowadays. For a long time, such news propagated over newspapers and traditional mainstream media; however, the recent emergence and popularity of social media platforms (e.g., Twitter) made it very easy to spread a rumor in just a few hours or even seconds across continents. That usually happens even before the news is picked up by the mainstream media. The spread of wrong information arises to have a strong (negative) influence, not only on involved individuals, but also on large communities and even countries.
With the advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and several other related fields, the problem of fake news detection has been studied in the past few years, and more extensively in the past couple of years. However, most of this work has focused mainly on English (and few other languages), while no attention was directed towards Arabic.
In this project, we propose to design, implement, and deploy an end-to-end system that monitors Arabic social media (in particular Twitter) to early-detect fake news, analyze its propagation, and provide supporting and/or refuting evidence that can be understood and verified by the end user. The outcomes of a real-time fake news detection system would clearly benefit news agencies around the world. We envision our system to be used by journalists as a source of evidence when newly emerging claims appear in social media and were not yet verified or even picked up by mainstream media.
Members
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Publications
Barrón-Cedeño, Alberto, Tamer Elsayed, Preslav Nakov, Giovanni Da San Martino, Maram Hasanain, Reem Suwaileh, and Fatima Haouari. "CheckThat! at CLEF 2020: Enabling the Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims in Social Media." In European Conference on Information Retrieval, pp. 499-507. Springer, Cham, 2020.
Haouari, Fatima, Maram Hasanain, Reem Suwaileh, and Tamer Elsayed. "ArCOV19-Rumors: Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset for Misinformation Detection." arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.08768 (2020).
Barrón-Cedeno, Alberto, Tamer Elsayed, Preslav Nakov, Giovanni Da San Martino, Maram Hasanain, Reem Suwaileh, Fatima Haouari et al. "Overview of CheckThat! 2020: Automatic identification and verification of claims in social media." In International Conference of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum for European Languages, pp. 215-236. Springer, Cham, 2020.
Shaar, Shaden, Alex Nikolov, Nikolay Babulkov, Firoj Alam, Alberto Barrón-Cedeno, Tamer Elsayed, Maram Hasanain et al. "Overview of CheckThat! 2020 English: Automatic identification and verification of claims in social media.", In Working Notes of CLEF 2020 - Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.
Hasanain, Maram, and Tamer Elsayed. "bigIR at CheckThat! 2020: multilingual BERT for ranking Arabic tweets by check-worthiness." In Working Notes of CLEF 2020 - Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.
Haouari, Fatima, Maram Hasanain, Reem Suwaileh, and Tamer Elsayed. "ArCOV-19: The First Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset with Propagation Networks." arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.05861 (2020).
Elsayed, Tamer, Preslav Nakov, Alberto Barrón-Cedeno, Maram Hasanain, Reem Suwaileh, Giovanni Da San Martino, and Pepa Atanasova. "Overview of the CLEF-2019 CheckThat! Lab: automatic identification and verification of claims." In International Conference of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum for European Languages, pp. 301-321. Springer, Cham, 2019.
Hasanain, Maram, Reem Suwaileh, Tamer Elsayed, Alberto Barrón-Cedeno, and Preslav Nakov. "Overview of the CLEF-2019 CheckThat! Lab: Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims. Task 2: Evidence and Factuality." In CLEF (Working Notes). 2019.
Essam, Marwa, and Tamer Elsayed. "bigIR at TREC 2019: Graph-based Analysis for News Background Linking." In TREC. 2019.
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