On 15 September, a Horizon Europe programme funded project called vera.ai started with the participation of Sirma AI (trading as Ontotext). vera.ai is short for VERification Assisted by Artificial Intelligence, which captures the project goal to equip scientific researchers and media practitioners with necessary quantitative and semi-supervised AI tools to help with debunking disinformation.
The project had its official “kick-off meeting” on 27 & 28 September 2022 near Athens, Greece. There, 14 consortium partners got to know each other in person, plan the work for the period ahead, fine-tune and align with each other on matters like communication structure, management, future research and development work, and much more.
In the course of vera.ai Ontotext will continue the development of the database of debunked content, created within the WeVerify project. This is a graph database that records debunked content, so professional users can establish easily whether a new image, video or claim has already been verified, by whom, when and how. The database is populated automatically with fact-checks from trustworthy IFCN sources. Content is enriched using natural language processing techniques so it is possible to distinguish between the false content being debunked and evidence from reliable sources cited in the debunk as well as to enable cross-lingual and multimodal near-duplicate search.
If you are eager to be up-to-date with the latest vera.ai developments, follow the project Twitter channel: @veraai_eu.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No:101070093. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
For more information, contact Doug Kimball, Chief Marketing Officer at Ontotext