Luigi Lomasto

Luigi Lomasto, Andrea Camoia, Alfonso Guarino et al.

In recent years, the spread of fake news has triggered a growing interest in Information Disorders (ID) on social media, a phenomenon that has become a focal point of research across fields ranging from complexity theory and computer science to cognitive sciences. Overall, such a body of research can be traced back to two main approaches. On the one hand, there are works focused on exploiting data mining to analyze the content of news and related metadata data-driven approach; on the other hand, works are aiming at making sense of the phenomenon at hand and their evolution using explicit simulation models model-driven approach). In this paper, we integrate these approaches to explore strategies for counteracting IDs. Heading in this direction, we put together: i. an Agent-Based model to simulate in a scientifically sound way both complex fake news dynamics and the effects produced by containment strategies therein; ii. Deep Reinforcement Learning to learn the strategies that can better mitigate the spread of misinformation. The outcomes of our work unfold on different levels. From a substantive point of view, the results of preliminary experiments started providing interesting cues about the conditions under which given policies can mitigate the spread of misinformation. From a technical and methodological point of view, we scratched the surface of promising and worthy research topics like the integration of social simulation and artificial intelligence and the enhancement of social science simulation environments.

Luigi Lomasto, Rosario Di Florio, Andrea Ciapetti et al.

This work describes an automatic text classification method implemented in a software tool called NETHIC, which takes advantage of the inner capabilities of highly-scalable neural networks combined with the expressiveness of hierarchical taxonomies. As such, NETHIC succeeds in bringing about a mechanism for text classification that proves to be significantly effective as well as efficient. The tool had undergone an experimentation process against both a generic and a domain-specific corpus, outputting promising results. On the basis of this experimentation, NETHIC has been now further refined and extended by adding a document embedding mechanism, which has shown improvements in terms of performance on the individual networks and on the whole hierarchical model.