Automated Fact Checking in the News Room

Fact checking is an essential task in journalism; its importance has been highlighted due to recently increased concerns and efforts in combating misinformation. In this paper, we present an automated fact-checking platform which given a claim, it retrieves relevant textual evidence from a document collection, predicts whether each piece of evidence supports or refutes the claim, and returns a final verdict. We describe the architecture of the system and the user interface, focusing on the choices made to improve its user-friendliness and transparency. We conduct a user study of the fact-checking platform in a journalistic setting: we integrated it with a collection of news articles and provide an evaluation of the platform using feedback from journalists in their workflow. We found that the predictions of our platform were correct 58\% of the time, and 59\% of the returned evidence was relevant

Improving Personalized Consumer Health Search

CLEF 2018 eHealth Consumer Health Search task aims to investigate the effectiveness of the information retrieval systems in providing health information to common health consumers. Compared to previous years, this year’s task includes five subtasks and adopts new data corpus and set of queries. This paper presents the work of University of Evora participating in two subtasks: IRtask-1 and IRtask-2. It explores the use of learning to rank techniques as well as query expan- sion approaches. A number of field based features are used for training a learning to rank model and a medical concept model proposed in previous work is re-employed for this year’s new task. Word vectors and UMLS are used as query expansion sources. Four runs were submitted to each task accordingly

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems