Geospatial data analysis in Russia’s geoweb

The chapter examines the role of geospatial data in Russia’s online ecosystem. Facilitated by the rise of geographic information systems and user-generated content, the distribution of geospatial data has blurred the line between physical spaces and their virtual representations. The chapter discusses different sources of these data available for Digital Russian Studies (e.g., social data and crowdsourced databases) together with the novel techniques for extracting geolocation from various data formats (e.g., textual documents and images). It also scrutinizes different ways of using these data, varying from mapping the spatial distribution of social and political phenomena to investigating the use of geotag data for cultural practices’ digitization to exploring the use of geoweb for narrating individual and collective identities online

Case study of the russian disinformation campaign during the war in Ukraine – propaganda narratives, goals, and impacts

This study examines strategic importance and use of disinformation and propaganda narrative of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation (Russia) about foreign citizens fighting in the war conflict in 2022 on the side of Ukraine. With that regard, Russia uses disinformation as a tool of the information warfare or as a non-lethal weapon and operationalizes it in accordance with „4D Concept - dismiss, distort, distract, and dismay “. Thereby, the disinformation placed by Russia represents a classic example of fake, false, and distorted information designed and distributed with the intention to cause a targeted strategical, operational, or tactical effect. This research is focused on the analysis of distributed disinformation and its media/propaganda effect on the abovementioned topic in the following countries: Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Montenegro. The research methodologies used in this study are content analysis and social network and instant messaging (IM) services analysis. The research has led to the conclusion that a systematic, continuous, and synchronised distribution of disinformation in a form of disinformation campaign can have negative impact on public opinion and trust. Therefore, such designed disinformation efforts require a quick and systematic reaction of the government since one of direct objectives of disinformation is to spread confusion among the public, undermine confidence in public institutions and Government and compromise the process of strategic decision making of the targeted country. To conclude, the likely effect of such disinformation campaign significantly increases as it spreads in a planned, synchronised and aggressive way through official and unofficial sources/communication channels and popular social networks and instant messaging (IM) services

A novel gluten knowledge base of potential biomedical and health-related interactions extracted from the literature: using machine learning and graph analysis methodologies to reconstruct the bibliome

Background In return for their nutritional properties and broad availability, cereal crops have been associated with different alimentary disorders and symptoms, with the majority of the responsibility being attributed to gluten. Therefore, the research of gluten-related literature data continues to be produced at ever-growing rates, driven in part by the recent exploratory studies that link gluten to non-traditional diseases and the popularity of gluten-free diets, making it increasingly difficult to access and analyse practical and structured information. In this sense, the accelerated discovery of novel advances in diagnosis and treatment, as well as exploratory studies, produce a favourable scenario for disinformation and misinformation. Objectives Aligned with, the European Union strategy “Delivering on EU Food Safety and Nutrition in 2050″ which emphasizes the inextricable links between imbalanced diets, the increased exposure to unreliable sources of information and misleading information, and the increased dependency on reliable sources of information; this paper presents GlutKNOIS, a public and interactive literature-based database that reconstructs and represents the experimental biomedical knowledge extracted from the gluten-related literature. The developed platform includes different external database knowledge, bibliometrics statistics and social media discussion to propose a novel and enhanced way to search, visualise and analyse potential biomedical and health-related interactions in relation to the gluten domain. Methods For this purpose, the presented study applies a semi-supervised curation workflow that combines natural language processing techniques, machine learning algorithms, ontology-based normalization and integration approaches, named entity recognition methods, and graph knowledge reconstruction methodologies to process, classify, represent and analyse the experimental findings contained in the literature, which is also complemented by data from the social discussion. Results and conclusions In this sense, 5814 documents were manually annotated and 7424 were fully automatically processed to reconstruct the first online gluten-related knowledge database of evidenced health-related interactions that produce health or metabolic changes based on the literature. In addition, the automatic processing of the literature combined with the knowledge representation methodologies proposed has the potential to assist in the revision and analysis of years of gluten research. The reconstructed knowledge base is public and accessible at https://sing-group.org/glutknois/Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia | Ref. UIDB/50006/2020Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED481B-2019-032Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431G2019/06Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431C 2022/03Universidade de Vigo/CISU

Towards the Identification of Fake News in Portuguese

All over the world, many initiatives have been taken to fight fake news. Governments (e.g., France, Germany, United Kingdom and Spain), on their own way, started to take action regarding legal accountability for those who manufacture or propagate fake news. Different media outlets have also taken a multitude of initiatives to deal with this phenomenon, such as the increase of discipline, accuracy and transparency of publications made internally. Some structural changes have lately been made in said companies and entities in order to better evaluate news in general. As such, many teams were built entirely to fight fake news - the so-called "fact-checkers". These have been adopting different techniques in order to do so: From the typical use of journalists to find out the true behind a controversial statement, to data-scientists that apply forefront techniques such as text mining and machine learning to support the journalist's decisions. Many of these entities, which aim to maintain or improve their reputation, started to focus on high standards for quality and reliable information, which led to the creation of official and dedicated departments for fact-checking. In this revision paper, not only will we highlight relevant contributions and efforts across the fake news identification and classification status quo, but we will also contextualize the Portuguese language state of affairs in the current state-of-the-art.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio