Hemant Purohit, Assistant Professor, Information Sciences and Technology, Huzefa Rangwala, Professor, Computer Science, and Antonios Anastasopoulos, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, are working to answer the question: How can an interactive and predictive tool be designed to empower local government agencies for proactive counter narrative communication to limit the spread of disinformation narratives by detecting early indicators of malice that lead to policy-failure events?
"The spread of disinformation on social media is a major challenge for our society and the government agencies are especially vulnerable to such targeted disinformation campaigns," said Principal Investigator Purohit.
The researchers aim to design a policy-implicative malicious behavior ontology in collaboration with emergency management and public policy expert Tonya Thornton, and a new detection-with-mitigation method for multilingual disinformation content on social media. The resulting method will be employed in an interactive and predictive modeling tool to discover the early indicators of policy-failure events via malicious behavior detection on social media.
"We are taking these steps to proactively aid local government agencies in their future emergency and crisis management efforts," said Co-PI Rangwala.
The researchers hold that this project will lead to an innovative paradigm shift in limiting the spread of disinformation narratives during crises through a novel computational approach of detection-with-mitigation for policy-implicative behaviors.
"This research will develop a hybrid approach of multilingual natural language processing (NLP) and multi-instance learning (MIL) methods to detect social media posts with malicious behaviors to proactively discover policy-failure events," said Co-PI Anastasopoulos.
The researchers received $64,971 from the Virginia Research Investment Fund for this project. This funding began in June 2021 and will end in late May 2022.
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