Innovative Media Intelligence Platform to Monitor Claims, Rumours, Opinions, Arguments and Stances Online

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Innovation in natural language processing has not evolved much beyond providing social listening to brands based on keyword, sentiment, topic and entity detection. Communications agencies find it hard to optimise campaign messaging to account for rapidly evolving zeitgeists online. They also suffer reputational damage from toxic trolling about products or brands, or made-up events that never took place. In 1998, UK doctor Andrew Wakefield published a study suggesting the MMR vaccine could trigger autism, which led to a 20% drop in MMR vaccination rates among 2-year-olds in England.Existing social listening tools monitor brand mentions, track the popularity of articles within key topics, and the evolution of sentiment. However, they don't extract what is actually being said. For example, they cannot detect the top trending arguments that are changing public opinion on an issue. They cannot track how public stance towards a product has been changing. They do not provide helpful counter-claims/arguments for the agency to nudge public dialogue in a certain direction. In summary, they don't provide proactive help for brands to optimise brand equity, or protect them against disinformation campaigns by sock-puppets.The project will produce an innovative media analysis system that can monitor claims, rumours, opinions, arguments and stances ("CROAS") on specific societal issues online. This will be surfaced as a suite of algorithms along with an end-client. The core innovation is building an annotation platform that can surface CROAS to specific expert community groups/domain specialists within vaccination and other societal issues. These individuals have the necessary domain knowledge to accurately tag and classify CROAS in text, better than non-experts. Using this system, Factmata hopes to deploy superior algorithms with novel train/test datasets for the problem of CROAS detection. The project will help communications agencies execute campaigns which align better with public debate, as well as protect their clients against disinformation.Factmata has experience in the fields of automated fact checking, natural language processing ("NLP"), data annotation and more, and has successfully built algorithms to detect hate speech and propaganda language. It has proven interest from 15+ communications agencies to build a CROAS monitoring system. The team has experience selling into the content moderation industry, and is looking to build a new product for the PR/ communications industry.The project will deliver significant export-led growth, a substantial ROI, increased employment and further opportunity for R&D investment.