rumor-tracker-uganda-covid
Scripts to group rumors and fake news about COVID-19 into topics.
Built to support Uganda Red Cross Society (URCS) during COVID-19 response.
Introduction
Rumors and fake news on COVID-19 are being collected by volunteers of URCS around the country. This repo contains the code to build & run a model which:
- Groups short messages: rumors and fake news
- Assign a topic and a representative example to each group
Built on top of GSDMM: short text clustering.
N.B. the creation of groups (a.k.a. clustering) is automated, but the topic description is not. You need a human to read some representative examples of each group and come up with a meaningful, human-readable description.
Setup and common issues
- Sync repository locally
- Make sure that openSSL is installed (https://slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html)
- Install the right libraries. Among others you need spellchecker and indexer. Indexer is install through pyspellchecker (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57602566/pip-install-indexer-error-in-python-3-7-in-windows-10)
- Update google-api-python-client (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45477016/importerror-cannot-import-name-discovery).
- Make sure that you have the right service_account_key.json (see below) and that the account related to the service account has access to the google sheets (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38949318/google-sheets-api-returns-the-caller-does-not-have-permission-when-using-serve)
Usage
Rumors (input) and topics (output) are stored in Google Sheets, access credentials are stored in service_account_key.json, ask Jacopo Margutti (jmargutti@redcross.nl).
Run the model with
python run_model.py