Pheme is a 36-month research project begun in 2014 into establishing the veracity of claims made on the internet.
Introduction
Unverified content is dominant and prolific in
social media
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...
messages. While big data typically presents challenges in its information volume, variety and velocity, social media presents a fourth: establishing veracity. The Pheme project aims to analyse content in real time and determine how accurate the claims made in it are. As claims propagate through a
social network
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...
, each individual chooses whether or not to pass on information, based on how accurate they think it is. Analysing the
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
used and the spread of information through a network, as well as the spatial and temporal context of the information, is used to build a real-time lie detector for social media. This will help, for example, emergency services (who already integrate social media as part of their alerting and response systems) to flag potential hoax emergencies.
Evaluating the authority of sources automatically is also a project goal, based on the treatment of the news and information that comes from them. For example, a tweet of a
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
news article would hold more weight than one from an unknown source.
The project is named after the Greek goddess
Pheme addresses social media lies in two scenarios: information about healthcare, which can be particularly damaging if wrong, and information used by journalists.
.
. Four companies are also taking part -
. Pheme is funded by the
.
* L. Derczynski, K. Bontcheva. Passive-Aggressive Sequence Labeling with Discriminative Post-Editing for Recognising Person Entities in Tweets. Proceedings of the European Association for Computation Linguistics, 2014.