Humane-AI report microproject 2022

The tangible objective of this micro-project was to develop a massive dataset for European News with a political leaning labeling. This was needed to tackle the next step of the project, which was the one of building a bias-minimizing recommender system for European news.The dataset comprehends millions of European news, and it has been enriched with metadata coming from Eurotopics.net. Each entry in the dataset contains the maintext, title, detected topic, publishment date, language, and news source together with news source metadata. This metadata comprehends the political leaning of the news source and its country.We then built an article bias classifier, in the attempt of predicting the political label of single articles using the labels obtained through distant supervision. We then applied explainable AI to our classifier and concluded that the classifier is effectively predicting the news source, rather than the political leaning.