News Verification Suite: Towards System Design to Supplement Reporters’ and Editors’ Judgements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper offers a conceptual basis and describes elements for a multi-layered system to provide information users (newsreaders) with credible information and improve the work processes of the online news (content) producers. I overview criteria of excellence (what editors consider newsworthy) and how reporters (and traditional newsroom professionals used to) verify information to provide high quality of news. I compare the “traditional model of journalism” to the current journalistic practices of “news sharing a.s.a.p.” and identify certain processes that are currently either missing or could be complemented with automatic verification functions, capitalizing on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Data-Mining (DM).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.053 | 0.094 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".