Mevan Babakar

Head of Automated Factchecking

Full Fact, UK

Mevan is Digital Products and Supporter Communications Manager at Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact-checking charity. She joined in 2014 and was instrumental in their first crowdfunding campaign, raising over £33,000 and enabling them to fact check the UK’s most recent General Election in 2015.

Out of hours, she is one of the team behind Citizen Beta, a London-based meetup where people gather to talk all things Civic Tech. Mevan was also a founding member of youth democracy charity Bite the Ballot where she launched Britain’s first ever National Voter Registration Day. She graduated with a Masters in Bioengineering from the University of Sheffield.

Speaking In

Identifying checkable claims with machine learning

The first step in automated fact-checking is to identify which sentences in a piece of text contain verifiable claims. Mevan builds on the history of Full Fact’s work in automated fact-checking to discuss the finer details of the methodology for extracting such sentences from the surrounding prose and the annotation scheme they’ve developed.