MSc Thesis Defense Announcement of Priyanshi Shah:"Multimodal fake news detection using a Cultural Algorithm with situational and normative knowledge"

Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - 10:00 to 12:00

SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

The School of Computer Science is pleased to present…

 

MSc Thesis Defense by: Priyanshi Shah

 
Date: Wednesday May 20, 2020
 
Time:  10:00 am – 12.00 pm
 
 

Abstract:

 
The proliferation of fake news on social media sites is a serious problem with documented negative impacts on individuals and organizations. This makes detection of fake news an extremely important challenge. A fake news item is usually created by manipulating photos, text or videos that indicate the need for multimodal detection. Researchers are building detection algorithms with the aim of high accuracy as this will have a massive impact on the prevailing social and political issues. A shortcoming of existing strategies for identifying fake news is their inability to learn a feature representation of multimodal (textual + visual) information. In this thesis research, we present a novel approach using a Cultural Algorithm with situational and normative knowledge to detect fake news using both text and images. The proposed model’s principal innovation is to use the power of natural language processing like sentiment analysis, segmentation process for feature extraction, and optimizing it with a Cultural algorithm. Then the representations from both modalities are fused, which is finally used for classification. An extensive set of experiments is carried out on real-world multimedia datasets collected from Weibo and Twitter. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for identifying fake news.
 
Keywords: fake news detection, sentiment analysis, segmentation process, cultural algorithm
 
 

Thesis Committee:

 
Internal Reader: Dr. Sherif Saad
 
External Reader: Dr. Mohammed Fazle Baki        
 
Advisor: Dr. Ziad Kobti
 
Chair:    Dr. Jianguo Lu

MSc Thesis Defense Announcement    Vector Institute logo of approved artificial intelligence topic

 

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