About the Project

The goals of the Kauwa Kaate project are broadly to combat the fake news epidemic that has affected the world today.

How we fact check: The Kauwa Kaate fact checker accepts text (articles) and images, and checks them against a predefined set of India focused fact checking sites such as check4spam.com, boomlive.com, Alt News, and fact checking subsites of a number of sources such as Times of India, India Today, The Hindu, etc.; more such sites are being added. A predefined set of (relatively trusted) news sites such as Times of India and The Hindu, to see if the article being fact checked has appeared on one of these sites, which can then be labeled as (relatively) trustworthy.

Since we need to match potentially long articles, along with image matching, and these features are not supported by web search engines, we crawl these sites regularly and perform search on our server on the crawled data. For images, we look for exact matches, and if that fails we do a partial image match.

If an article/image does not match either of the above cases, we have a few automated checks that we carry out. A long term research goal of the project is to do more on automated checking. For example, we wish to check against a set of sites known to be biased on a particular topic (say politics), and tell the user that their search article appears on such a site, and they should dig deeper and not necessarily accept it as is. We do not believe that fully automated checking and debunking is possible with current generation AI technology.

For more technical details: More details about our system can be found in this paper:
The Kauwa-Kaate Fake News Detection System: Demo
Abhishek Bagade, Ashwini Pale, Shreyans Sheth, Megha Agarwal, Soumen Chakrabarti, Kameswari Chebrolu, and S. Sudarshan
ACM India Joint International Conference on Data Science and Management of Data (CoDS-COMAD) 2020

Mobile App: Do try our mobile app (currently Android only), Kauwa-Kaate Android App

Acknowledgments: We thank all the journalists and organizations that are performing fact checking on a daily basis for their contributions. They are the source of our information, and we basically act as a search engine. Do visit their sites from our links, so they benefit from the good and hard work that they are doing.