Separating the truth from the lies in world of online news - Artificial Intelligence Online

Both the bookies and the pollsters predicted the outcome of the European Referendum incorrectly, but do you know who got it right? According to analysis from Pheme, of the 291,000 tweets where a vote was expressed, leave votes outnumbered remain significantly – and that's not even Pheme's main aim. Named after the Greek goddess of fame and rumours, the project, which began in 2014, is designed to assess online rumours, to help journalists determine what's true and what's made up. "Professor Rob Procter (now at Warwick) and I were discussing the manual analysis his team did with the Guardian on analysing rumours circulating during the England riots in 2011 – for example, that the London Eye was on fire," says Kalina Bontcheva, Professor of Text Analytics at the University of Sheffield, who works on Pheme. "My background is in automatic text analysis, so we discussed how rumour analysis and detection can be automated or, at least, support be offered to decision makers to help them with the process."