Research
The Discourse Processing Lab is involved in a number of projects:
- a study of online news comments
- a project on detecting fake news and misinformation
- the Gender Gap Tracker
Moderating online news comments
We are interested in the language of online news comments. This is a corpus and computational project.
- Corpus 1: . More than 630,000 comments posted on the site of The Globe and Mail. Publicly available.
- Corpus 2: the , 12,000 comments annotated for constructiveness.
- Computational work: , identifying constructive comments -- those that contribute to the conversation, creating civil dialogue.
Detecting misinformation and fake news
We are working on methods to identify whether a news article is an instance of misinformation. Work in progress includes:
- , a dataset of fact-checked news articles.
- A .
The Gender Gap Tracker
The , developed within our lab and in collaboration with , monitors the proportion of women and men quoted in news stories in mainstream Canadian media (in English).
We have had great media coverage for this tool. You can check the Conversation piece for an explanation of the tracker, and see other media mentions:
- (The Conversation)
- (The Toronto Star)
- (間眅埶AV News)
- (Ottawa Citizen and Montreal Gazette)
We have also produced a , with the ability to analyze one text at a time and with a monthly analysis of topics and gender.