Announcement

Dear Participants,
we kindly ask you to go through the following checklist and install necessary software before the workshop start.

1) Please download Anaconda and install Python 3.6 on your laptop. Make sure you know how to find and open Jupyter Notebook on your OS.

2) Import and activate the following environment. The import can be done from the command line (see our quick guide).

Thank you and we are looking forward to meeting you soon!
Workshop Organizers

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We create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. The increasing availability and throughput of information flowing through social media outlets or internet-based news poses challenges for both the users and journalists. Users need to navigate through different news sources and, ideally, fact-check the content. Journalists face the challenge of summarizing often complicated and extensive data sets, and verifying that what is reported is indeed factual, all in a timely manner.

In this workshop, we want to equip you with the tools that will help you to quickly make sense of large streams of text and voice information, to both be better at reporting it and to defend yourself against misinformation. The visualisation tools and machine learning techniques we show can also be used by anyone, and journalists in particular, to deliver a better content.

This full-day course consists of two parts. In the morning, we will first provide a crash course on Python, and cover various packages for static and interactive visualizations. Then, we will give an introduction to machine learning in the context of natural language processing, and to neural networks, which will prepare you for the afternoon hands-on session.

In the afternoon, you will have the opportunity to explore the current real-life data set from WikiLeaks. Our project will incorporate hands-on tutorials for different use cases, such as text summarization, text retrieval and inference from knowledge bases. Finally, we will show you how to wrap the results in an intuitive user interface.

Participants of our workshop will get hands-on experience with data processing, visualization, building neural and deep networks in Python. After obtaining a flavor of natural language processing, they will learn how to apply these techniques to the text summarization, retrieval and ultimately fact-checking on real-life datasets.

• bring your own laptops
• have Anaconda installed on your computer
• need to know how to program
• be familiar with linear algebra
• knowledge of Python or machine learning is not a requirement, but knowing Python is a plus