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Predicting Factuality of Reporting and Bias of News Media Sources (arxiv.org)
3 points by infodocket on Oct 5, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of checking single stories, this study rates whole news outlets for factual reporting and bias, using clues from their articles, Wikipedia page, Twitter account, web address, and web traffic. It beat the standard comparison systems by a large margin, and every clue type helped.

Abstract

We present a study on predicting the factuality of reporting and bias of news media. While previous work has focused on studying the veracity of claims or documents, here we are interested in characterizing entire news media. These are under-studied but arguably important research problems, both in their own right and as a prior for fact-checking systems. We experiment with a large list of news websites and with a rich set of features derived from (i) a sample of articles from the target news medium, (ii) its Wikipedia page, (iii) its Twitter account, (iv) the structure of its URL, and (v) information about the Web traffic it attracts. The experimental results show sizable performance gains over the baselines, and confirm the importance of each feature type.

Ramy Baly, Georgi Karadzhov, Dimitar Alexandrov, James Glass, Preslav Nakov
arXiv:1810.01765 · cs.IR, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Oct 2, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · Fact-checking, political ideology, news media, EMNLP-2018

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