Tech & Check Lab Notes No. 1
By Bill Adair - September 25, 2017
This is the first of our updates on the Duke Tech & Check projects. We’ve divided them into two groups: the Pop-Up Family, which will include the apps that provide instant fact-checking to the public; and the ClaimBuster Family, the tools that will help fact-checkers find claims to check.
Pop-Up Family: Our first project is a manual app for iOS that will allow fact-checkers to push alerts during live events. They’ll use our CMS to push links to previous fact-checks or short messages about factual claims.
Chris has made good progress building the app and we’ve hired Registered Creative to do the design and UX work. Our goal is to have it ready for the State of the Union address on Jan. 30. We’re on track to make that deadline.
We’ll take the lessons we learn from the manual app and apply them to the automated apps we plan to build for TV, iOS and other platforms.
ClaimBuster Family: We’re using Chengkai’s ClaimBuster API to develop tools that can automatically find factual claims in transcripts. We’re identifying the most promising claims to check and will then email them to The Washington Post, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and other fact-checkers.
Lucas and Asa have nearly finished their first project, which scrapes cable news transcripts, submits the sentences to be scored by the ClaimBuster API and then ranks them by score. They’ve written a script that will email the top factual claims to fact-checkers every morning.
They have been working to optimize the output for fact-checkers, including reducing the number of news reports in the sentences that are included. They hope to start sending test emails to the fact-checkers in a couple of weeks. They then will turn to working with other partners in the Tech & Check Cooperative to begin adding other sources of political claims to these daily alerts.
More Co-Op News:
Conference at Duke: We’ve set March 29-30 for our Tech & Check conference. We’ll have more details soon.
Full Fact progress: Mevan Babakar did an impressive demo of Full Fact’s prototypes at a meeting in South Africa.
Co-Op Community Meeting: We hope to have our first Tech & Check video conference in a couple of weeks. I’ll email you with the date and time.