Fighting Bad Information with AI (Finally a Full Fact Fact-checking Special)

Ladies and gentlemen,

It gives us great pleasure to provide you with full details of our next event. As previously announced we will have a fact-checking special! How timely is that? Also, there should be something for everybody, ranging from misinformation to information retrieval, from data mining to BERT and lots more. Do come along for an exciting event.

We have a double bill this time with David Corney, Senior NLP Data Scientist at Full Fact, and Alex Joseph, Data Scientist also at Full Fact.

See you next Wednesday!
Udo, David & Bernd

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Speakers
David Corney (Senior Data Scientist at Full Fact)
Alex Joseph (Data Scientist at Full Fact)

Title
Fighting bad information with AI

Abstract
Bad information ruins lives. It harms our communities, spreads hate, hurts our democracy and leads to bad decisions.

Full Fact is here to change debate for the better. We ask people to correct the record when they get things wrong, campaign for better information in public life and develop new technology to counter misleading claims.

We have been developing technology to help increase the speed, scale and impact of fact checking in the UK and overseas. We are not attempting to replace fact checkers with technology, but rather to empower fact checkers with the best tools. We want to use technology to help:

• Know the most important thing to be fact checking each day
• Know when someone repeats something they already know to be false
• Check things in as close to real-time as possible

In this pair of talks, we will describe the tools we are building for media monitoring, claim detection, claim matching and automated statistics checking. The technology behind these tools ranges from simple keyword matching through information retrieval algorithms like BM25 and large language models like BERT.

Short bios
David joined Full Fact in 2019 as a data scientist specialising in natural language processing. He helps bring AI into Full Fact's tools to better support fact checkers and other colleagues. David has previously worked in academia and for tech startups, where he developed tools to analyse news articles and other text.

Alex joined Full Fact at the beginning of 2020 to work with the automated fact-checking team in a Data Science role. Alex previously worked in the finance sector for both established corporations and fintech start-ups, before moving into the Defence industry where he worked on AI research projects for the Ministry of Defence.