Artificial Intelligence (AI) and human knowledge seal a strategic alliance against disinformation along the new research project funded by the European Union (EU) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), called HYBRIDS – Hybrid Intelligence to monitor, promote and analyse transformations in good democracy practices. People and machines will now join forces to curb today’s biggest threats to democracy and stability: fake news, hate speech and misinformation.
The European consortium HYBRIDS consists of a wide-ranging group of participants from industry and academia, and it’s funded with 2.9 million euros by EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. As countries’ parliaments and governments are becoming aware of the need for a global strategy against disinformation, the project will focus on automatic detection of misinformation, which in itself is an extremely complex task that requires deep semantic knowledge and different inference and reasoning mechanisms based on natural language.
In this context, the European Union (EU) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) have just given its support to a new transnational research project whose scientific aim will be to design and develop new automatic tools to counter the threat of misinformation, based on natural language processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
HYBRIDS will develop different Deep Learning techniques based of an exhaustive analysis of public discourse about crucial global issues, such as health, climate crisis, European scepticism or immigration, which will take into account both traditional media and content published through social networks.
HYBRIDS consists of a multidisciplinary research team, capable of transferring the knowledge acquired in the human and social sciences to the technological tools of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms.
Pablo Gamallo, an expert in computational linguistics heading the project from the leading institution in Spain (CiTIUS – Research Centre on Intelligent Technologies of the University of Santiago de Compostela), states that “the ultimate goal is to generate new neuro-symbolic interpretation systems, something that we know as ‘hybrid intelligence”. “The idea of hybrid intelligence consists of combining the high computational capacities of recent neural algorithms with symbolic representations that model human knowledge, thus paving the way to overcome the shortcomings of current artificial intelligence methods.”.
