QF''s AI project helps detect ''disinformation''

(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Doha: At present the World health Organization’s main concern is fighting the pandemic, but then its secondary concern is fighting disinformation. It has raised concern over an ‘infodemic’ - information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak.   

The first step to stop fake news and propaganda is to verify sources and that will help building a better internet, says Preslav Nakov, a computer scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) a member of Qatar Foundation.

Since it is impossible to verify everything that is published, building a better internet means stopping propaganda and fake news before it spreads, according to Nakov, a specialist in speech and language.

He leads the project ‘Tanbih’ using machine learning to assess the reliability of media sources. 

That allows his team to gather news articles alongside signals about their trustworthiness and political biases, all in a Google News-like format.

The project reflects QF’s belief in the power of AI to offer solutions that simplify complex tasks through data analysis and machine learning and its commitment in addressing global challenges through research, development, innovation in AI.  

Like many other researchers, Nakov prefer the term ''disinformation” rather than fake news as it has been a term that is adopted by major organizations like the United Nations, NATO, the European Union. 

''Disinformation is something that has a very clear definition. It has two components. First, it is something that is false, and second, it has a malicious intent: intent to do harm. And again, the vast majority of research, majority of efforts, many fact-checking initiatives, focus on whether something is true or not. And it is typically the second part that is actually important. The part whether there is malicious intent,” said Nakov in an interview podcast on MIT Technology Review. 

The podcast was produced in partnership with the Qatar Foundation. 

''The other thing is that we cannot possibly fact-check every single claim in the world. Not manually, not automatically. Manually, that’s out of the question. And, I like to say that we can fact-check the fake news before it was even written. Because the moment when it’s written, the moment when it’s put in social media and there’s a link to a website, if we have this website in our growing database of continuously analyzed websites, we can immediately tell you whether this is a reliable website or not. Of course, reliable websites might have also poor information, good websites might sometimes be wrong as well. But we can give you an immediate idea,” said Nakov. 

Tanbih started indeed as a news aggregator, and it has grown into something quite larger than that, into a project, which is a mega-project in the Qatar Computing Research Institute. And it spans people from several groups in the institute, and it is developed in cooperation with MIT. 

In reply to a question, he explained how ‘Tanbih’ helps to uncovers disinformation. Nakov said, ''We started the project with the aim of developing tools that we can actually put in the hands of the final users. And we decided to do this as part of a news aggregator, think of something like Google News. And as users are reading the news, we are signaling to them when something is propagandistic, and we’re giving them background information about the source. 

''What we are doing is we are analyzing media in advance and we are building media profiles. So we are showing, telling users to what extent the content is propagandistic. We are telling them whether the news is from a trustworthy source or not, whether it is biased: left, center, right bias. Whether it is extreme: extreme left, extreme right. Also, whether it is biased with respect to specific topics.” 

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