Researchers develop AI that distinguishes between satire and fake news
How can you distinguish between satire and fake news? It usually comes down to semantic and linguistic differences, but the nuances can be tough to spot. That’s why researchers at George Washington University, Amazon AWS AI, and startup AdVerifai investigated a machine learning approach to classifying misleading speech. They say the AI model they developed, which outperformed the baseline, lays the groundwork for the study of additional linguistic features.
The researchers hypothesized that metrics of text coherence might be useful in capturing semantic relatedness between sentences of a story.
The researchers leveraged a statistical technique called principal component analysis to convert potentially correlated metrics into uncorrelated variables (or principal components), which they used in two logistic regression models (functions that model the probability of certain classes) with the fake and satire labels their dependent variables. Next, they evaluated the models’ performance on a corpus containing 283 fake news stories and 203 satirical stories that had been verified by hand.
The team reports that a classifier trained on the “significant” indices outperformed the baseline F1 score, a measure of the frequency of false positives and negatives.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/05/researchers-develop-ai-that-distinguishes-between-satire-and-fake-news/