Today, journalist, information analyst, and everyday news consumers are tasked with discerning and fact-checking the news. This task has became complex due to the ever-growing number of news sources and the mixed tactics of maliciously false sources. To mitigate these problems, we introduce the The News Landscape (NELA) Toolkit: an open source toolkit for the systematic exploration of the news landscape. NELA allows users to explore the credibility of news articles using well-studied content-based markers of reliability and bias, as well as, filter and sort through article predictions based on the user's own needs. In addition, NELA allows users to visualize the media landscape at different time slices using a variety of features computed at the source level. NELA is built with a modular, pipeline design, to allow researchers to add new tools to the toolkit with ease. Our demo is an early transition of automated news credibility research to assist human fact-checking efforts and increase the understanding of the news ecosystem as a whole.
Paper
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Assessing the News Landscape: A Multi-Module Toolkit for Evaluating the Credibility of News
Semantic Scholar · Computer Science · 2018
Abstract
Today, journalist, information analyst, and everyday news consumers are tasked with discerning and fact-checking the news. This task has became complex due to the ever-growing number of news sources and the mixed tactics of maliciously false sources. To mitigate these problems, we introduce the The News Landscape (NELA) Toolkit: an open source toolkit for the systematic exploration of the news landscape. NELA allows users to explore the credibility of news articles using well-studied content-based markers of reliability and bias, as well as, filter and sort through article predictions based on the user's own needs. In addition, NELA allows users to visualize the media landscape at different time slices using a variety of features computed at the source level. NELA is built with a modular, pipeline design, to allow researchers to add new tools to the toolkit with ease. Our demo is an early transition of automated news credibility research to assist human fact-checking efforts and increase the understanding of the news ecosystem as a whole.