South Asia Grants Program Utilizes Artificial Intelligence for Effective Fact-Checking

The South Asia Grants Program (SAGP) supports civil society organizations in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka to enhance good governance, combat disinformation, promote gender equality, and encourage environmental governance.   

LIRNEasia is a SAGP partner based in Sri Lanka that works to counter disinformation. With the support of the SAGP, LIRNEasia has made several strides in assisting fact-checkers in the region and recently unveiled a beta version called “Dissect” – a cutting-edge web tool developed in collaboration with Watchdog Sri Lanka. The tool employs advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enable effective factchecking in local South Asian languages, addressing the region’s lack of effective digital tools for evaluating information and factchecking in local languages. The tool is compatible with the Sinhala language and developments are in progress to also achieve compatibility with the Tamil language. The Dissect web tool builds upon a white paper previously developed by LIRNEasia under the SAGP program which outlines the fundamentals and technical requirements for developing an AI-based tool suitable for factcheckers in the region.  LIRNEasia is currently beta testing the tool and has gathered feedback from local journalists and factcheckers to further refine the tool for optimal performance.