A LIE DETECTOR FOR SOCIAL NETWORKS TO BE BUILT
On April 1, known as the April Fools' Day, saying innocent lies is allowed and is even fun. But deception and misleading information on the internet however sometimes may lead to serious consequences. An international team of researchers, including...
On April 1, known as the April Fools' Day, saying innocent lies is allowed and is even fun. But deception and misleading information on the internet however sometimes may lead to serious consequences. An international team of researchers, including Bulgarian ones, will develop “a lie detector” to filter untrue information spread on the social networks.
Georgi Georgiev, one of the Bulgarian participants in the project, explained details about it for the BNT programme ‘Around the world and at Home’.
The project is named PHEME, after the Greek mythological character Pheme – famed for spreading rumours. It is funded by the European Commission and is a collaboration of nine partners: five big universities - Sheffield, Warwick, King’s College London, Saarland in Germany and MODUL University Vienna in Austria and four companies – ATOS in Spain, iHub in Kenya, Ontotext in Bulgaria and swissinfo.ch. The partners work on the development of a system, which will separate true facts from false rumours online.
The rumours will be classified based on several factors: speculation, controversy, misinformation and disinformation.
The results of the system searches will be displayed on a visual dashboard so users can see them.
There will be an opportunity to analyse the text on the basis of many levels – lexical, semantic and syntactic, then the text will be cross-referenced with data sources which are evaluated as particularly trustworthy.
The EU project for building the lie detector for the social media will be completed in 3 years. Even on the April Fools’ Day users of the system will be able to avoid misleading information, rumours or attempts for fraud in the network.
Pheme creators explain that although many users will have access to the application, this excludes the possibility for anyone to use it for censure or manipulation of media or individuals.
