A granular approach to source trustworthiness for negative trust assessment

The problem of determining what information to trust is crucial in many contexts that admit uncertainty and polarization. In this paper, we propose a method to systematically reason on the trustworthiness of sources. While not aiming at establishing their veracity, the metho

Multidimensional news quality: A comparison of crowdsourcing and nichesourcing

In the age of fake news and of filter bubbles, assessing the quality of information is a compelling issue: it is important for users to understand the quality of the information they consume online. We report on our experiment aimed at understanding if workers from the crowd can be a suitable alternative to

Computable trustworthiness ranking of medical experts in Italy during the SARS-CoV-19 pandemic

Source trustworthiness can help discerning reliable and truthful information. We offer a computable model for the dynamic assessment of sources trustworthiness based on their popularity, knowledge-ability, and reputation. We apply it to the debate among medical experts in Italy during three distinct phases of the SARS-CoV-19 pandemic, and validate it against a dataset of newspaper articles. The model shows promising results in the analysis of expert debates their impact on public opinion

Trusting Semi-structured Web Data

Abstract. The growth of the Web brings an uncountable amount of useful information to everybody who can access it. These data are often crowdsourced or provided by heterogenous or unknown sources, therefore they might be maliciously manipulated or unreliable. Moreover, because of their amount it is often impossible to extensively check them, and this gives rise to massive and ever growing trust issues. The research presented in this paper aims at investigating the use of data sources and reasoning techniques to address trust issues about Web data. In particular, these investigations include the use of trusted Web sources, of uncertainty reasoning, of semantic similarity measures and of provenance information as possible bases for trust estimation. The intended result of this thesis is a series of analyses and tools that allow to better understand and address the problem of trusting semi-structured Web data

Transparent assessment of information quality of online reviews using formal argumentation theory

Review scores collect users’ opinions in a simple and intuitive manner. However, review scores are also easily manipulable, hence they are often accompanied by explanations. A substantial amount of research has been devoted to ascertaining the quality of reviews, to identify the most useful and authentic scores through explanation analysis. In this paper, we advance the state of the art in review quality analysis. We introduce a rating system to identify review arguments and to define an appropriate weighted semantics through formal argumentation theory. We introduce an algorithm to construct a corresponding graph, based on a selection of weighted arguments, their semantic distance, and the supported ratings. We also provide an algorithm to identify the model of such an argumentation graph, maximizing the overall weight of the admitted nodes and edges. We evaluate these contributions on the Amazon review dataset by McAuley et al. (2015), by comparing the results of our argumentation assessment with the upvotes received by the reviews. Also, we deepen the evaluation by crowdsourcing a multidimensional assessment of reviews and comparing it to the argumentation assessment. Lastly, we perform a user study to evaluate the explainability of our method, i.e., to test whether the automated method we use to assess reviews is understandable by humans. Our method achieves two goals: (1) it identifies reviews that are considered useful, comprehensible, and complete by online users, and does so in an unsupervised manner, and (2) it provides an explanation of quality assessments