May 18th - Andreas Vlachos


Andreas Vlachos (University of Cambridge)

Fact-checking as a conversation

Abstract:

Misinformation is considered one of the major challenges of our times resulting in numerous efforts against it. Fact-checking, the task of assessing whether a claim is true or false, is considered a key weapon in reducing its impact. In the first part of this talk, Professor Andreas Vlachos will present his recent and ongoing work on automating this task using natural language processing, moving beyond simply classifying claims as true or false in the following aspects: returning evidence for the predictions, factually correcting the claims and adversarial evaluation. The second part of this talk will focus on an alternative approach to combatting misinformation via dialogue agents, and present results on how internet users engage in constructive disagreements and problem solving deliberation.

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Bio: Professor Andreas Vlachos is a senior lecturer at the Natural Language and Information Processing group at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. His current projects include dialogue modelling, automated fact checking and imitation learning. Professor Andreas has also worked on semantic parsing, natural language generation and summarization, language modelling, information extraction, active learning, clustering and biomedical text mining. His research team is supported by grants from ERC, EPSRC, ESRC, Facebook, Amazon, Google and Huawei.