FactExtract: Automatic Collection and Aggregation of Articles and Journalistic Factual Claims from Online Newspaper

Nowadays the web is very rich that's why it is the principal corpus of fact checkers. These journalists in their quest for the truth daily scan manually a lot of sources in search of relevant informations. But in the data-journalism context where data are always increasing in real time, this manual exploration became impossible and more and more laborious. One of the actual used techniques for this problem is the automatic extraction of information on web pages more known as "web scraping". The principal goal of web scraping is to retrieve on a web page. The main purpose of web scraping is to bring out a web page, specific and highly structured data with a reduced human effort. In this paper, we present an automatic extractor of articles and journalistic claims implemented on 15 Senegalese news websites.

I. Introduction

Now, Big Data is very popular because it offers several possible storage and processing. These new possibilities make it possible today to collect, process, analyze, decide and predict. But, who is talking about decision making speaks about the veracity of the informations. Hence the rise of fact-checking, a new discipline betweenjournalism and computer science whose hobbyhorse is the verification of the facts emitted in the media space [9]. In practice, fact-checking consists of querying several data sources, analyzing the results to determine the veracity or otherwise of a fact [8]. This work of verifying the veracity of the facts emitted in the media space that was once provided by investigative journalism, is today, with the new technologies of information and communication, at the origin of a new form of journalism better known by its English name «fact-checking». It results from the sharp increase in the media and the proliferation of false information in the latter.