The ROMCIR 2021 Workshop

Reducing Online Misinformation
through Credible Information Retrieval

To be held in conjunction with ECIR 2021: The 43rd European Conference on Information Retrieval

LUCCA | TUSCANY | ITALY (Online Event) – April 1, 2021

Nowadays, we are all aware of the problems that can arise from coming into contact with dis- and mis-information that are propagated mainly through the Web, social media in particular, through different kinds of information disorder communication forms.

False news can, for example, guide public opinion in political and financial choices; false reviews can promote or, on the contrary, destroy economic activities based on malicious behaviors; unverified medical information can lead people to follow behaviors that can be harmful to their own health (and to that of society as a whole).

What we see unfolding right before our eyes is nothing less than Moore’s Law applied to the distribution of mis-information: an exponential growth of available technology coupled with a rapid collapse of costs.

Filloux, F. (2017) You can’t sell news for what it costs to make, The Walkley Magazine on Medium

In this context, it becomes essential to guarantee to users access to credible information that does not distort their perception of reality. For this reason, in recent years, numerous approaches have been mainly proposed for the identification of false information, in different contexts, and for different purposes.

However, the problem is still of great interest with respect to many open issues, such as early detection of dis/misinformation, the retrieval of credible information, the development of solutions that can be understood by final users (explainable AI), the study of the problem in the health-related field, the relationship between security, privacy and credibility in information access and dissemination.

In this scenario, the role of social computing is crucial to investigate such open issues, providing users with automatic but understandable tools to help them come into contact with genuine information.

There is an immediate need to seek workable solutions for the polluted information streams that are now characteristic of our modern, networked, and increasingly polarised world.

Wardle, C., Derakhshan H. (2017) INFORMATION DISORDER: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making. Council of Europe

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