Belittling the Source: Trustworthiness Indicators to Obfuscate Fake News on the Web

Diego Esteves, Aniketh Janardhan Reddy, Piyush Chawla, Jens Lehmann

Abstract
With the growth of the internet, the number of fake-news online has been proliferating every year. The consequences of such phenomena are manifold, ranging from lousy decision-making process to bullying and violence episodes. Therefore, fact-checking algorithms became a valuable asset. To this aim, an important step to detect fake-news is to have access to a credibility score for a given information source. However, most of the widely used Web indicators have either been shutdown to the public (e.g., Google PageRank) or are not free for use (Alexa Rank). Further existing databases are short-manually curated lists of online sources, which do not scale. Finally, most of the research on the topic is theoretical-based or explore confidential data in a restricted simulation environment. In this paper we explore current research, highlight the challenges and propose solutions to tackle the problem of classifying websites into a credibility scale. The proposed model automatically extracts source reputation cues and computes a credibility factor, providing valuable insights which can help in belittling dubious and confirming trustful unknown websites. Experimental results outperform state of the art in the 2-classes and 5-classes setting.
Anthology ID:
W18-5508
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER)
Month:
November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos, Oana Cocarascu, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Arpit Mittal
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
50–59
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5508
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-5508
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Diego Esteves, Aniketh Janardhan Reddy, Piyush Chawla, and Jens Lehmann. 2018. Belittling the Source: Trustworthiness Indicators to Obfuscate Fake News on the Web. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER), pages 50–59, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Belittling the Source: Trustworthiness Indicators to Obfuscate Fake News on the Web (Esteves et al., EMNLP 2018)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/W18-5508.pdf
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