Event Details

Online misinformation had a dramatic impact on our society in recent years, affecting people in many sectors, from finance, health to politics. The importance of combating the spread of fake news has been acknowledged by the public, companies and governments. The problem is being addressed through policies, journalistic work, media literacy of the population, social media platforms response and research. Our research aims to tackle this problem using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing methods to propose systems for automated rumour verification that would assist journalists in their work. In this talk Elena will discuss various types of existing approaches to automated rumour verification, overview recent advances and outline open challenges that rumour verification models are facing, and share her view on how to tackle them.

Speaker Bio

Elena is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Queen Mary University of London and the Alan Turing Institute in London. Her research is on Tackling Misinformation in Social Media Conversations using Natural Language Processing. She works on automated methods for rumour resolution, where rumours are claims with unknown veracity spreading on social media, primarily using Deep Learning models. Automatic resolution of rumours is a challenging task that includes various subtasks, such as rumour detection, tracking, stance classification, and, finally, veracity assessment. In her work, she studies the relations between these tasks, as patterns of support and denial among responses can be indicative of the final veracity label. She also utilises the structure of the conversations to enhance predictive models.

Elena obtained a PhD in Urban Science from the University of Warwick and spent part of it based at the Alan Turing Institute. She holds a joint MSc in Complex Systems Science from the University of Warwick (UK) and Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), as well as an MSc and BSc in Applied Mathematics and Informatics from Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod (Russia).