Knowledge is Power: Fighting Disinformation with Data and AI
Abstract:
The harmful impact of disinformation on society and individuals is large and growing. Reliable knowledge about the world, and about our information space,can be leveraged to diminish this negative impact. I will present research carried in my team to leverage high-quality reference information. In the StatCheck project, transferred to RadioFrance, we focus on making high-quality statistics available and easy to search. We show that naive use of LLMs is not only expensive, it also fails to handle information searches in very large statistic corpora.Instead, we present a frugal and higher-quality approach, that follows the specific nature of statistic datasets to better answer user queries over such corpora. Then, I will present an efficient approach, based on reinforcement learning, which identifies within a given Web site all the files having certain user-specified types. This allows in particular to find all statistic files within varied-structure web sites, to be used as a basis for fact-checking.
Joint work with Oana Balalau, Helena Galhardas (INESC-ID Portugal), Antoine Gauquier and Pierre Senellart (ENS and Inria), and other colleagues.
Bio sketch:
Ioana Manolescu is a senior researcher at Inria, in France. She is the lead of the CEDAR INRIA team focusing on rich data analytics at cloud scale. She is also the president of BDA, the French national scientific association focused on data management. She is or has been a member of the PVLDB Endowment Board of Trustees, of the ACM SIGMOD Executive Committee, as well as program chair, general chair, and editorial roles in major conferences and journals on data management and the Web. She is a Senior ACM member and a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD 2020 Contribution Award.
Ioana has co-authored more than 200 articles in international journals and conferences and several books. Her main research interests encompass blending Data and AI methods for working with complex, semistructured data, in particular for large heterogeneous text-and-data graphs. In the last decade, her research has tackled several problems raised by journalistic fact-checking and investigative journalism, an area where she has collaborated successfully with journalists from Le Monde and RadioFrance.