All Roads Lead to Rome (or Paris!): Context Aggregation and Analysis Tool Presentation at SIGIR ROME 2019 workshop in Paris

On 25 July 2019 WeVerify participated in the International Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation Exposure (ROME) 2019 in Paris. The event was co-located with the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Τhe topics discussed in the workshop concerned, among others, the challenges of online misinformation, directions for automatic approaches of fact-checking, works on reducing misinformation online and the preparation of social media to resist false news.

Guillaume Bouchard and Vassilis Plachouras from Facebook, UK and Guido Caldarelli from IMT Lucca, Italy, were the workshop organizers. Approximately 25 participants attended three keynotes, six oral presentations of the accepted papers, and a 50 minutes poster session of the ten accepted works for poster presentation.

Carolina Scarton from the University of Sheffield was invited as a keynote speaker and gave a presentation covering several aspects of the WeVerify project. She first introduced the technological, legal, societal and ethical dimensions of the mis- and disinformation challenge. Then, she focused on the way people believe false narratives, what motivates their sharing and the resulting consequences. Finally, she discussed existing approaches developed against online misinformation, an AMI conceptual framework (Agent, Message, Interpreter) and outstanding socio-technical and ethical challenges.

CERTH researcher Olga Papadopoulou made an oral and poster presentation of her team’s work. It was entitled ‘Context Aggregation and Analysis: A tool for User Generated Video Verification’. This work, which initially started within the InVID project and continues within WeVerify, aims to help journalists and citizens with the verification of user-generated videos disseminated through three well-known social media platforms: these are YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. The tool collects, filters and analyses information related to ‘video context’, e.g. video title, comments, account that posted the video, etc. and generates a verification report. The tool can be used as a standalone tool or as part of the InVID-WeVerify verification plugin.

Author: Olga Papadopoulou (CERTH). Editor: Jochen Spangenberg (DW)

Image credits: respective persons named. Usage rights have been obtained by the authors named above for publication in this article. Copyright / IPR remains with the respective originators.

Note: This post is an adaptation of the Mever@ROME2019 blog post, which was originally prepared for the CERTH Media Verification team (MeVer)  website.