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Facebook reportedly to buy UK AI firm to help fight fake news

Facebook is acquiring UK-based Bloomsbury AI, to help it tackle fake news and other content issues, sources with knowledge on the matter have claimed. The startup has built a natural language processing (NLP) system that Facebook wants to use. With the acquisition, Bloomsbury AI employees will move to Facebook along with the technology they’ve developed.

It’s expected that Facebook will pay something between $23- and $30 million to acquire the startup and the amount could be paid as a mixture of cash and stocks. One source told TechCrunch that the biggest appeal to Facebook about the firm was its CTO and Head of Research, Sebastian Riedel. He is considered a leading expert in the field of NLP and is also a co-founder and advisor for Factmata, a firm that is developing tools for combating fake news.

Aside from combating fake news, Bloomsbury AI’s product, Cape, could be deployed as a workplace tool for companies to find out about content in documents, or to improve Facebook’s search and knowledge-base functionality.

As of yet, Facebook is still to comment on the acquisition.

Source: TechCrunch

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