Andreas Vlachos

Title: 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 I will present our 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. In the second part of this talk, I will present an alternative approach to combatting misinformation via dialogue agents, and present results on how internet users engage in constructive disagreements and problem-solving deliberation.

Bio: I am professor of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge and a Dinesh Dhamija fellow of Fitzwilliam College. Current projects include dialogue modelling, automated fact checking and imitation learning. I have also worked on semantic parsing, natural language generation and summarization, language modelling, information extraction, active learning, clustering and biomedical text mining. My research team is supported by grants from ERC, EPSRC, ESRC, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Huawei, the Alan Turing Institute and the Isaac Newton Trust.