MBZUAI student Zain Muhammad Mujahid is researching methods to detect media bias using NLP and LLMs. His approach profiles bias across media outlets using LLMs like ChatGPT to predict bias based on 16 identifiers. The research aims to develop a tool that instantly provides a bias profile for a given media URL. Why it matters: This research has the potential to combat misinformation and enhance media literacy in the region by providing tools to identify biased reporting, and it is expanding to Arabic and other languages.
A new methodology emulating fact-checker criteria assesses news outlet factuality and bias using LLMs. The approach uses prompts based on fact-checking criteria to elicit and aggregate LLM responses for predictions. Experiments demonstrate improvements over baselines, with error analysis on media popularity and region, and a released dataset/code at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/llm-media-profiling.
MBZUAI Professor Preslav Nakov has developed FRAPPE, an interactive website that analyzes news articles to identify persuasion techniques. FRAPPE helps users understand framing, persuasion, and propaganda at an aggregate level, across different news outlets and countries. Presented at EACL, FRAPPE uses 23 specific techniques categorized into six broader buckets, such as 'attack on reputation' and 'manipulative wording'. Why it matters: The tool addresses the increasing difficulty in discerning factual information from disinformation, providing a means to identify biases in news media from different countries.
This paper introduces a new task: detecting propaganda techniques in code-switched text. The authors created and released a corpus of 1,030 English-Roman Urdu code-switched texts annotated with 20 propaganda techniques. Experiments show the importance of directly modeling multilinguality and using the right fine-tuning strategy for this task.
Muhammad Arslan Manzoor became MBZUAI's first NLP Ph.D. graduate, focusing his research on media bias under Professor Preslav Nakov. His thesis, 'MGM,' explored using audience overlap graphs to predict the factuality and bias of news media, an approach that differs from traditional textual analysis. Manzoor's work aims to improve the efficiency of media profiling in real-time by leveraging relationships captured in media graphs. Why it matters: This research offers innovative methods for identifying bias in news, which is crucial for promoting informed social discourse and combating disinformation in the region.