NP2021_Can Open Access Help Fight Fake News?

Slides from “Misinformation and truth: from fake news to retractions to preprints"

Description:

The subject of fake news is very topical. With social networks, and the advances of artificial intelligence, fake news are created and circulate faster and faster. Health and sciences are particularly nasty topics for fake news and the current context of Covid19 pandemic has made this crisis in the scientific information even more obvious.

Building on the results that were presented at the Open Science Conference 2020, a prototype that analyzes automatically open access research articles to help verify scientific claims was built.

This prototype takes a claim such as : “does coffee cause cancer ?” as an input, and builds three indicators to evaluate the truth behind this claim. The first indicator assesses whether the claim has been extensively studied. The second indicator is based on an NLP pipeline, and analyzes whether the articles generally agree or disagree with the claim. The third indicator is based on the retrieval and analysis of numerical values from the pertinent articles.

In this session, we would like to present our methodology, discuss the results that we have obtained and extend the discussion to the role that Open Access scholarly literature can play to fight false scientific claims and to help inform the public.