• Funding : CNRS, University of Arizona
  • Start year :
  • 2023

Some grand challenges facing humanity include climate change and health. Unfortunately, the implementation of effective solutions for these challenges is counteracted by misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM), e.g., climate-change denying. To address this issue, the SURFING project (Using argumentation for fact checking) proposes robust and holistic fact verification methods. The proposed methods can reduce data bias, aggregate information across multiple statements, and yield global conclusions. While humans can utilize background and domain knowledge to argue about the veracity of a fact, computers do not normally have access to such information. To capture this real-world background knowledge, we aim to mine arguments from the web and construct domain-agnostic fact graphs that indicate if facts attack/support each other. We then propose to develop argumentation theory-based graph algorithms to aggregate and argue over this knowledge. Based on these steps, we will arrive at the truthfulness value of a given argument that considers all the background knowledge available.