The NLP Seminar Series at AI Sweden is a bi-weekly forum for people who work with or are interested in Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Join us online or on site at the AI Sweden Stockholm office at Fleminggatan 41. We welcome all attendees to work from the AI Sweden Stockholm office for the entire day.
Wednesday October 26, 15.00-16.30:
Title: Detect - Verify - Communicate: Combating Misinformation with More Realistic NLP
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych, Technical University Darmstadt, Germany
Abstract:
Dealing with misinformation is a grand challenge of the information society directed at equipping the computer users with effective tools for identifying and debunking misinformation. Current Natural Language Processing (NLP) including its fact-checking research fails to meet the expectations of real-life scenarios. In this talk, we show why the past work on fact-checking has not yet led to truly useful tools for managing misinformation, and discuss our ongoing work on more realistic solutions. NLP systems are expensive in terms of financial cost, computation, and manpower needed to create data for the learning process. With that in mind, we are pursuing research on detection of emerging misinformation topics to focus human attention on the most harmful, novel examples. Automatic methods for claim verification rely on large, high-quality datasets. To this end, we have constructed two corpora for fact checking, considering larger evidence documents and pushing the state of the art closer to the reality of combating misinformation. We further compare the capabilities of automatic, NLP-based approaches to what human fact checkers actually do, uncovering critical research directions for the future. To edify false beliefs, we are collaborating with cognitive scientists and psychologists to automatically detect and respond to attitudes of vaccine hesitancy, encouraging anti-vaxxers to change their minds with effective communication strategies.
Each seminar features an initial 45-minute presentation by practitioners or researchers followed by discussion. The NLP Seminar Series is organized by AI Sweden and RISE NLP Group.
Moderators:
Magnus Sahlgren, Head of Research, Natural Language Understanding at AI Sweden
Joakim Nivre, Head of Natural Language Processing at RISE.
Proposals for presentations can be sent to magnus.sahlgren@ai.se or francisca.hoyer@ai.se