Supporting verification of news articles with automated search for semantically similar articles

Fake information poses one of the major threats for society in the 21st century. Identifying misinformation has become a key challenge due to the amount of fake news that is published daily. Yet, no approach is established that addresses the dynamics and versatility of fake news editorials. Instead of classifying content, we propose an evidence retrieval approach to handle fake news. The learning task is formulated as an unsupervised machine learning problem. For validation purpose, we provide the user with a set of news articles from reliable news sources supporting the hypothesis of the news article in query and the final decision is left to the user. Technically we propose a two-step process: (i) Aggregation-step: With information extracted from the given text we query for similar content from reliable news sources. (ii) Refining-step: We narrow the supporting evidence down by measuring the semantic distance of the text with the collection from step (i). The distance is calculated based on Word2Vec and the Word Mover's Distance. In our experiments, only content that is below a certain distance threshold is considered as supporting evidence. We find that our approach is agnostic to concept drifts, i.e. the machine learning task is independent of the hypotheses in a text. This makes it highly adaptable in times where fake news is as diverse as classical news is. Our pipeline offers the possibility for further analysis in the future, such as investigating bias and differences in news reporting.

Exploring semantically-related concepts from Wikipedia: the case of SeRE

In this paper we present our web application SeRE designed to explore semantically related concepts. Wikipedia and DBpedia are rich data sources to extract related entities for a given topic, like in- and out-links, broader and narrower terms, categorisation information etc. We use the Wikipedia full text body to compute the semantic relatedness for extracted terms, which results in a list of entities that are most relevant for a topic. For any given query, the user interface of SeRE visualizes these related concepts, ordered by semantic relatedness; with snippets from Wikipedia articles that explain the connection between those two entities. In a user study we examine how SeRE can be used to find important entities and their relationships for a given topic and to answer the question of how the classification system can be used for filtering.