Full Fact is developing two new tools for automated fact-checking by Mădălina Ciobanu.
From the post:
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The first tool, Live, is based on the assumption that people, especially politicians, repeat themselves, Babakar explained, so a claim that is knowingly or unknowingly false or inaccurate is likely to be said more than once by different people.
Once Full Fact has fact-checked a claim, it becomes part of their database, and the next step is making sure that data is available every time the same assertion is being made, whether on TV or at a press conference. “That’s when it gets interesting – how can you scale the fact check so that it can be distributed in a much grander way?”
Live will be able to monitor live TV subtitles and eventually perform speech-to-text analysis, taking a live transcript from a radio programme or a press conference and matching it against Full Fact’s database.
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The second tool Full Fact is building is called Trends, and it aims to record every time a wrong or false claim is repeated, and by whom, to enable fact-checkers to track who or what is “putting misleading claims out into the world”.
Because part of Full Fact’s remit is also to get corrections on claims they verify, the team wants to be able to measure the work of their impact, by looking at whether a claim has been said again once they have fact-checked it and requested a correction for it.
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The work on Live and Trends has just been funded and the tools are scheduled to appear in 2018.
They are hiring, by the way: Automated Factchecking at Full Fact. Full Fact is also a charity, in case you want to donate to support this work.
I wonder how Full Fact rate stories such as Crowdstrike‘s, a security firm that lives in the back pocket of the Democratic Party (US), report claiming Russian hacks of the DNC? A report it later revised.
Personally since the claims were “confirmed” by a known liar, James Capper, former Director of National Intelligence, I would downgrade such reports and repetitions by others to latrine gossip.
In case you haven’t read in detail the various reports, there have been no records produced, but much looks like, “in our experience,” etc., but a positive dearth of facts. That interested “experts” say it is so, in the absence of evidence, doesn’t make their claims facts.
Looking forward to news on these projects as they develop!