Research Observatory: AI in supporting fact checking, news verification and creative work

When
31 Mar 2021
6:30 PM - 7:45 PM
Location
Zoom

Registration

Attendance is free

AI in supporting fact checking, news verification and creative work

Exploiting information assets to enhance verification in Journalism: the DMINR approach by Andrew MacFarlane & Sondess Missaoui

Presentation slides

The verification of information is a critical working practice in the field of journalism. Before a news story is published, the writer and editorial team will check the facts to ensure that the information contained, that is the content as well as the sources, is accurate and will support story veracity. This activity has now moved to the digital space, where there are many challenges including the variety and accuracy of sources and the vast amount of information available from a wide variety of information assets including newswires, company information, web documents and social media etc. Therefore, there is significant interest in specific tools that support the verification process both in terms of structuring and organising a large amount of available heterogeneous content and sources. Such tools often provide automated support through AI and machine learning technologies to help journalists verify and organise information. One such application is extracting relationships between entities such as companies, people, places and location etc. This requires the deployment of text analytic technologies such as natural language processing to extract and identify entities together with their relationships. In this talk we overview approaches to named entity recognition to support journalist verification of information, and a method of visualisation to support engagement and interaction with the entities. This is embodied in a tool called DMINR that is designed to support search and discovery in information assets and allow exploration of the connections between entities, thus supporting verification of connections and serendipitous discovery. This work is embodied in a tool called DMINR (Digital Mining in News and Retrieval), more details of the project can be found on the project website.

Exploiting information assets to enhance creativity and innovation: the CebAI approach by Neil Maiden

Presentation slides

Many information assets owned by and available to organisations are under-utilised. This talk with outline an emerging approach to exploit these information assets, in order to enhance the creative thinking that underpins innovations in organisations. It will report how different natural language, sense-making, creative search and landscaping algorithms are being combined to provide new forms of interactive digital support for everyday creativity. It will describe an emerging human-centred AI approach, in which software algorithms and interactive features are combined with support for enhancing creative self-belief in professionals in different sectors. It will draw on examples in design thinking, journalism, strategic thinking for businesses, and elite sports training. The work is being undertaken as part of CebAI, the new National Centre for Creativity enabled by AI based at City, University of London.

The class was delivered via Zoom and was attended by 67 participants from 25 countries.