MAI4CAREU - Natural Language Processing – Linguistic Features to Identify Fake News and Misinformation

The University of Cyprus's course on Natural Language Processing is part of the Master programmes in Artificial Intelligence 4 Careers in Europe (MAI4CAREU). One of Master's programme's courses is split up into several lectures and is taught by Demetris Paschalides from the Department of Computer Science, whose research interest is focused on the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to address social and ethical challenges.

Learning outcomes

• Strategies and challenges in mitigating the spread of fake news and disinformation
• Deep learning model that leverages an extensive set of linguistic features
• Feature selection in optimising the model’s size and efficiency

Course outline

The Natural Language Processing course is divided into 7 subsections:

1. Text Pre-processing
2. Language Modeling
3. Text Classification
4. Word Vector Representation
5. Distributed Contextual Embeddings
6. Application of NLP in:
   1. Hate-speech Identification
   2. Fake News Detection
   3. Political Polarization
7. Introduction to Large Language Models