Keynote speaker-Gabriella Pasi

Title: Coping with Misinformation Online: Open Issues and Challenges

Abstract: In the online world, where a large amount of content of different nature and origin is often spread without any form of reliable external control, the risk of running into misinformation is not negligible. In recent years, there is an increasing awareness of the possible risks of running into fake news, fake reviews, or health misinformation, which has raised the need to define automated systems  able to identify truthful information. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to automatically assess the truthfulness of content disseminated online. Most of them are data-driven approaches, based on machine learning techniques, but recently also model-driven approaches have been studied, in particular, approaches based on the Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) paradigm, and also based on the use of Knowledge Bases. Both of the latter types of approaches try to inject prior knowledge related to the problem under consideration. In this talk an overview of the approaches coping with the problem of misinformation detection will be addressed, with particular emphasis on model-driven approaches, their open issues, and current challenges. Their application to specific problems will also be addressed, as well as the problem of the evaluation of these systems.

Biography: Gabriella Pasi is Full Professor and Head of the Department of Informatics, Systems, and Communication (DISCo) of the University of Milano-Bicocca. Within DISCo she leads the Information and Knowledge Representation, Retrieval, and Reasoning (IKR3) Lab. Her main research interests are related to Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems, Text Mining, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, User Modeling, Social Media Analytics. She is Associate Editor of several international journals, and she has delivered several keynote talks at international conferences. She has participated in the organization of several international events, in both roles of organizer and Program Chair. She has published more than 250 papers in international journals and books, and on the proceedings of international conferences.