"Truth-Seeking in the Age of Disinformation"
Given the constantly growing proliferation of false claims online in recent years, there has been also a growing research interest in automatically distinguishing false rumors from factually true claims. In this talk, we will present several related problems. First, in the context of investigative journalism, we will address the problem of automatically identifying which claims in a political debate are most worthy and should be prioritized for fact-checking. We will then present a general-purpose deep learning framework for fully automatic fact checking using external sources, which taps the potential of the entire Web as a knowledge source to confirm or reject a claim. We will further extend this framework to the context of community question answering, where the goal is to decide whether an answer to a factual question is factually true or false. We will also cover some related problems such as stance detection, trust-worthiness estimation for Web sites, political ideology, bias and propaganda detection, as well as finding seminar users and opinion manipulation trolls in news community forums.
Bio: Dr. Preslav Nakov is a Senior Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU. His research interests include computational linguistics and natural language processing, machine translation, question answering, fact-checking, sentiment analysis, lexical semantics, Web as a corpus, and biomedical text processing.
At QCRI, he leads a project whose aim is to develop a news aggregation application to limit the effect of fake news, propaganda and media bias by helping users step out of their bubble and achieve a healthy news diet. He is also a co-PI of an MIT-QCRI collaboration project on Arabic Speech and Language Processing for Cross-Language Information Search and Fact Verification, and he was a co-PI of another MIT-QCRI collaboration project on Speech and Language Processing for Arabic (2013-2016).
Preslav Nakov co-authored a Morgan & Claypool book on Semantic Relations between Nominals, two books on computer algorithms, and many research papers in top-tier conferences and journals. He received the Young Researcher Award at RANLP'2011. He was also the first to receive the Bulgarian President's John Atanasoff award, named after the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer.
Preslav Nakov is Secretary of ACL SIGLEX, the Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Lexicon of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). He is also Secretary of SIGSLAV, the ACL SIG on Slavic Natural Language Processing. He is an Action Editor of the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) journal, a Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering, an Associate Editor of the AI Communications journal, and Editorial Board member of the Language Science Press Book Series on Phraseology and Multiword Expressions. He served on the program committees of the major conferences and workshops in Computational Linguistics, including as a co-organizer and as an area/publication/tutorial/shared task chair, Senior PC member, student faculty advisor, etc.; he co-chaired SemEval 2014-2016 and was an area co-chair of ACL, EMNLP, NAACL-HLT, and *SEM, a Senior PC member of AAAI and IJCAI, a shared task co-chair of IJCNLP, and a tutorial chair of ACL.
Preslav Nakov received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley (supported by a Fulbright grant and a UC Berkeley fellowship), and a MSc degree from the Sofia University. He was a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore, a honorary lecturer in the Sofia University, and a research staff in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
