Researchers at the University of Calicut in collaboration with Queen’s University, Belfast, United Kingdom, have developed an emotion cognizant health fake news detection mechanism to curtail disinformation and misinformation in the wake of the COVID-19 scare.
For the last two years, experts at the two universities have been working towards tackling fake news on health. Now, The requirement is more after the World Health Organisation (WHO) cautioned against giving false hopes to people exploiting the widespread fear of the pandemic.
Dr. Lajish V.L., head of the department of computer science, University of Calicut, said in a statement on Friday that the research method relied on an exceedingly simple mechanism, that of identifying emotionally oriented words in a news article and adding the emotion label beside them, before using detection mechanisms.
Artificial Intelligence
“We, at the Computational Intelligence and Data Analytics [CIDA] Lab, started our work in this area by understanding the holistic approach of this research. We used different types of advanced Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms, especially to cultivate emotion amplification-based text representations and to conduct fake news detection experiments,” he said.
Explaining the need for a high-potential fake news detection system, K. Anoop, a researcher, said the commercial and political phenomenon of empathically optimised automated fake news was on near-horizon. His research on effect-oriented fake news detection using Machine Learning was one among the AWSAR-2019 award winners for the best popular science stories, instituted by the Department of Science and Technology.
“The simplicity of the emotion-enrichment method we propose makes it applicable for usage within a diversity of fake news detection tools,” said Dr. Deepak Padmanabhan, faculty member of the computer science department at Queen’s University. In view of COVID-19 regulations that make travel impossible, the researchers will present their work virtually to the research community. The department of computer science, University of Calicut, has set up a web portal — https://dcs.uoc.ac.in/cida/break-the-fake — for collecting fake news in both English and Malayalam from the public for experimentation.
The portal will eventually evolve into a fact-finding system which will be freely available in the public domain.
