Finding Streams in Knowledge Graphs to Support Fact Checking

The volume and velocity of information that gets generated online limits current journalistic practices to fact-check claims at the same rate. Computational approaches for fact checking may be the key to help mitigate the risks of massive misinformation spread. Such approaches can be designed to not only be scalable and effective at assessing veracity of dubious claims, but also to boost a human fact checker's productivity by surfacing relevant facts and patterns to aid their analysis. To this end, we present a novel, unsupervised network-flow based approach to determine the truthfulness of a statement of fact expressed in the form of a (subject, predicate, object) triple. We view a knowledge graph of background information about real-world entities as a flow network, and knowledge as a fluid, abstract commodity. We show that computational fact checking of such a triple then amounts to finding a "knowledge stream" that emanates from the subject node and flows toward the object node through paths connecting them. Evaluation on a range of real-world and hand-crafted datasets of facts related to entertainment, business, sports, geography and more reveals that this network-flow model can be very effective in discerning true statements from false ones, outperforming existing algorithms on many test cases. Moreover, the model is expressive in its ability to automatically discover several useful path patterns and surface relevant facts that may help a human fact checker corroborate or refute a claim.Comment: Extended version of the paper in proceedings of ICDM 201

The Diffusion of Fact-checking: Understanding the Growth of a Journalistic Innovation

How and why is political fact-checking spreading across journalism? The research presented in this report suggests that the challenge of disseminating the practice is significant -- mere proximity does not appear to be sufficient to drive adoption. However, we find that factchecking can be effectively promoted by appealing to the professional values of journalists.Our first study considers whether journalists might emulate their colleagues in emphasizing fact-checking, following the practices of professional peers in the way that other journalistic innovations have disseminated. However, the practice does not appear to diffuse organically within a state press corps. While fact-checking coverage increased dramatically during the 2012 campaign, these effects were concentrated among outlets with dedicated fact-checkers. We find no evidence that fact-checking coverage increased more from 2008 to 2012 among outlets in states with a PolitiFact affiliate than among those in states with no affiliate.However, it is possible to effectively promote fact-checking. In a field experiment during the 2014 campaign, we find that messages promoting the genre as a high-status practice that is consistent with journalistic values significantly increased newspapers' fact-checking coverage versus a control group, while messages emphasizing audience demand for the format did not (yielding a smaller, statistically insignificant increase). These results suggest that efforts to create or extend dedicated fact-checking operations and to train reporters are the most effective way to disseminate the practice of fact-checking. While audience demand is an important part of the business case for the practice, newsrooms appear to respond most to messages emphasizing how fact-checking is consistent with the best practices and highest aspirations of their field

URLs in the OPAC : comparative reflections on US vs UK practice

To examine whether placing URLs into library OPACs has been an effective way of enhancing the role of the catalogue for the contemporary library user

Scalable visualisation methods for modern Generalized Additive Models

In the last two decades the growth of computational resources has made it possible to handle Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) that formerly were too costly for serious applications. However, the growth in model complexity has not been matched by improved visualisations for model development and results presentation. Motivated by an industrial application in electricity load forecasting, we identify the areas where the lack of modern visualisation tools for GAMs is particularly severe, and we address the shortcomings of existing methods by proposing a set of visual tools that a) are fast enough for interactive use, b) exploit the additive structure of GAMs, c) scale to large data sets and d) can be used in conjunction with a wide range of response distributions. All the new visual methods proposed in this work are implemented by the mgcViz R package, which can be found on the Comprehensive R Archive Network

In support of long distance agree

In the recent literature the phenomenon of long distance agreement has become the focus of several studies as it seems to violate certain locality conditions which require that agreeing elements in general stand in clause-mate relationships. In particular, it involves a verb agreeing with a constituent which is located in the verb's clausal complement and hence poses a challenge for theories that assume a strictly local relationship for agreement. In this paper we present empirical evidence from Greek and Romanian for the reality of long distance agreement. Specifically, we focus on raising constructions in these two languages and we show that they do not involve movement but rather instantiate long distance agreement. We further argue that subjunctives allowing long distance agreement lack both a CP layer and semantic Tense. However, since the embedded verb also bears phi-features, these constructions pose a further problem for assumptions that view the presence of phi-features as evidence for the presence of a C layer. Finally, we raise the question of the common properties that these languages have that lead to the presence of long distance agreement