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Hackathon on COVID-19 Related Disinformation (Virtual Event)

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General information

In the autumn of 2020, CLARIN organises a virtual hackathon on the detection of disinformation in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Overall timeline of all related activities: 21 September - 15 October 2020 

About the hackathon

Disinformation and fake news have been a growing concern all over the world within the last years. With the global COVID-19 pandemic, this issue has become even more urgent and is calling for methods for the detection of disinformation based on scientific insights. Collaboration between such fields as (computational) linguistics, data science and other related disciplines can yield significant progress by using existing data to classify disinformation or even to predict to a certain degree whether a piece of text is likely to be misinterpreting the facts.

With this hackathon, CLARIN intends to bring together cross-disciplinary groups of researchers to work on the task of disinformation detection in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. They are invited to use existing data sets containing disinformation and fake news in order to create algorithmic solutions to research questions of their choice, e.g. by assigning the likelihood for a text to be disinformation or automatically detecting re-postings of known conspiracy theories even if they are rephrased. Analytical and comparative contributions are also welcome.

The hackathon will start with an online introductory session on 21st September at 10:00 CEST during which various existing datasets relevant to the topic will be presented by their creators  who will provide context on the creation process and illustrate the goals of the collection. After this introduction, the participants will form teams and decide which task they would like to tackle during the hackathon month. The actual work will happen asynchronously which means that the teams can organise themselves in whichever way they see fit and work on their chosen task until the 15th October.

In the middle of the hackthon period the organisers will offer a slot for discussion where all teams will have the possibility to update themselves on their progress and discuss any identified obstacles. This informal interaction will take place as part of the CLARIN Bazaar during the Virtual CLARIN Annual Conference. Each team will be able to present their progress as well as point to problems encountered along the way. This is meant to allow cooperation between the different teams, and to grant them the possibility to learn from each other on how to solve certain problems that may have already been encountered by others. 

The hackathon will conclude on 15th October from 15:00-17:00 (CEST) with another online session where all teams will present their results.

The outcome of the hackathon will be disseminated through diverse CLARIN communication and other relevant channels. Depending on the quality of the obtained results, CLARIN will investigate the possibility of collecting the output of the hackathon in a post-event publication, including an invitation to submit to the Selected Papers of the CLARIN Annual Conference 2020. 

Registration

Registration is closed.  

Programme (Introductory Event)

Agenda for the introductory meeting on 21st September (All times are in CEST):

10:00 Introduction/Welcome (Alexander König, CLARIN ERIC) (slides)

10:15 Dataset presentations

12:45-13:15 Introductions of participants/teams

13:00-13:45 General Q&A/discussion

 

Programme (Concluding Event)

Agenda for the concluding meeting on 15th October (All times are in CEST):

15:00 Introduction/Welcome (Alexander König, CLARIN ERIC)

15:05 Team presentations

  • 15:05 Team Groningen (Tommaso Caselli, Beata Skuczyńska, Boris Marinov, Joost Warmerdam)
    • Presentation
    • Discussion
  • 15:25 Team Hamburg (Seid Muhie Yimam, Soniya Vijayakumar, Ayush Gupta, Shaily Bhatt, Saba Anawar)
    • Presentation
    • Discussion
  • 15:55 Team Misinfo-Detect (Sreekanth Madisetty, Piyush Mishra)
    • Presentation
    • Discussion

16:20 General Discussion

16:45 Concluding Remarks/Goodbye (Maria Eskevich, CLARIN ERIC)

17:00 End of the event

 

If you have any additional quesitons, please get in touch at hackathon [at] clarin.eu.

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