Understanding Misinformation: Perspectives on Emerging Issues

The ever-increasing volume of information disseminated by technological advances leads to new challenges with respect to misinformation and fake news. Misinformation could potentially affect people in their daily life, and the choices they are making, be it medical, financial, or the upcoming elections. Technological solutions to identify, verify, and manage misinformation aim to combat the harmful effects of misinformation. In this research proposal, we explore the use of machine learning algorithms in combination with symbolic approaches to identify misinformation in German news texts in order to help users spot deceptive articles. Based on linguistic aspects of the text, news stories are classified as misleading or truthful. In particular, we plan to compare it to existing symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches for misinformation detection.