AI-based study for detecting COVID19 misinformation
- Dates: 2020–21
- Funding body: EPSRC
- Primary investigator: Serge Sharoff (Centre for Translation Studies)
- Language at Leeds satellites: Corpus linguistics
- Language at Leeds themes: Language and computation
Scientific messages in peer reviewed academic research papers often inform government health policies, these are communicated to the news media for public broadcasting. However increasingly social media is playing a significant role in disseminating public health messages. This dramatically enhances the prominence of highly publicized media topics and the public awareness of these topics. This is a largely unregulated space with the potential to influence mistrust, misinformation and cause low confidence in public health messaging. We will provide a reliable classifier to detect message distortion to protect the general public and to ensure they receive accurate and valid information.