Arab Researchers Use Artificial Intelligence in Bid to Thwart Fake News – Al-Fanar Media

The algorithm uses the frequency and severity of these patterns to judge the likelihood that a social media post or even news article has been falsified.

The researchers were able to verify their fake news checker algorithm against a database containing over 12,000 samples of Internet posts, which have already been pre-labeled by humans as either fake or real. The results showed that the software was accurate 99.4 percent of the time.

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But theres a problem. In Aldwairis line of work, a sample size of 12,000 is small. The researchers want to test their algorithm on more than 100 million data points, and its unrealistic that humans will ever be able to label that many posts as real or fake, for them to check their results against.

It requires a continuous learning process,says Jarrah, and in order to improve accuracy, you have to give it as many sources of news as possible to learn from.

To solve this quandary, theyre using a process known as machine learning in which computers, not humans, will label a social media post or news article as real or fake. This will end up with false positives, but thats where the earlier algorithm comes in.

Our algorithm should hopefully filter out these false positives, says Aldwairi.

Additionally, the corrected false positives will feed back into the machine learning to help it understand its mistakes and improve.

The end result of all of this would be a piece of software that gives a rating to the Internets vast network of websites on a sliding scale and notifies users of this score when they visit a given page.

Were talking about less than a year for it to be a downloadable product, says Jarrah.

While the machine learning is taking place, the researchers are hunting for suitable datasets in Arabic to teach their algorithm to work in both languages. We hope to finish that this year too, says Jarrah.

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Arab Researchers Use Artificial Intelligence in Bid to Thwart Fake News - Al-Fanar Media