Research summary
False, inaccurate or misleading information is called “misinformation”—and it is becoming more common in our society. Dr. Ebrahim Bagheri, Canada Research Chair in Social Information Retrieval, is trying to address the challenges posed by misinformation while contributing to the field of social information retrieval.
He and his research team are working to model misinformation and identify causal relationships between real-world events and misinformation in online platforms. They are also retrieving factual information that counters misinformation and selectively presenting it to improve uptake. From a more theoretical perspective, they are developing techniques to model topically focused text collections to measure semantic association and causal relations, and retrieving content by considering aspects of coverage, trust, persuasion and discord.