16 December 2017
University and polytechnic students were recently asked to come up with technological solutions to combat the scourge of fake news during a get-together recently held at the Google Asia-Pacific office in Pasir Panjang.
The winning team, a group of five first-year students from the Singapore University of Technology and Design, devised an ingenious solution.
First, a web-based crawler is used to search and analyse the credibility of online articles, with the information collected stored on an online database. Then, users download a Google Chrome extension, which when activated, rates each article on its credibility. This rating is based on a sentiment analysis conducted using natural language processing.
On a platform similiar to Reddit or Quora, users will be able to rank the credibility of articles that they read (on a scale of one to 10). A higher score will reflect a higher level of credibility.
“By getting people to come together, we can encourage discussion and use that information to check for credibility”, said Mr Brandon Ong, a member of the winning team.