Reliability Estimation of News Media Sources: Birds of a Feather Flock Together

Sergio Burdisso, Dairazalia Sanchez-cortes, Esaú Villatoro-tello, Petr Motlicek


Abstract
Evaluating the reliability of news sources is a routine task for journalists and organizations committed to acquiring and disseminating accurate information.Recent research has shown that predicting sources’ reliability represents an important first-prior step in addressing additional challenges such as fake news detection and fact-checking.In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for source reliability estimation that leverages reinforcement learning strategies for estimating the reliability degree of news sources. Contrary to previous research, our proposed approach models the problem as the estimation of a reliability degree, and not a reliability label, based on how all the news media sources interact with each other on the Web.We validated the effectiveness of our method on a news media reliability dataset that is an order of magnitude larger than comparable existing datasets. Results show that the estimated reliability degrees strongly correlates with journalists-provided scores (Spearman=0.80) and can effectively predict reliability labels (macro-avg. F1 score=81.05).We release our implementation and dataset, aiming to provide a valuable resource for the NLP community working on information verification.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.383
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6893–6911
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.383
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sergio Burdisso, Dairazalia Sanchez-cortes, Esaú Villatoro-tello, and Petr Motlicek. 2024. Reliability Estimation of News Media Sources: Birds of a Feather Flock Together. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6893–6911, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Reliability Estimation of News Media Sources: Birds of a Feather Flock Together (Burdisso et al., NAACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.383.pdf
Copyright:
 2024.naacl-long.383.copyright.pdf