News Story

ClimateSense team wins top places in two international misinformation challenges

Monday 2 Feb 2026

KMi researchers, working with colleagues at EURECOM, have secured first place in two major international competitions focused on online misinformation. Their success comes as part of ClimateSense, a project developing new tools for understanding how scientific and political information circulates online.

The team achieved top rankings in both the CLEF CheckThat! 2025 lab and the PROMID misinformation challenge, two global benchmarks in fact‑checking and natural language processing.

Advancing subjectivity and science‑discourse detection

At CheckThat!, teams were asked to spot different kinds of misleading or unclear content online. EURECOM focused on identifying whether news sentences were objective or opinion‑based, while KMi led the task on recognising science‑related content, an area central to ClimateSense.

Using a streamlined AI approach, the ClimateSense team took first place in this scientific discourse task. Their method was particularly good at distinguishing between straightforward scientific explanation, personal opinion, public debate, and misinformation, an increasingly important skill as online information spreads faster and becomes harder to judge.

Recognising misinformation during conflict

The team also took first place in the PROMID challenge, which focused on spotting misinformation in tweets about the Russo–Ukrainian conflict. Faced with highly imbalanced training data, the researchers enhanced the dataset using material from KMi’s Fact‑checking Observatory. This significantly strengthened model performance and helped secure the winning position.

Positioning KMi at the forefront of misinformation research

The ClimateSense team presented their results at major international forums alongside leading researchers in information retrieval and fact‑checking. Their achievements highlight KMi’s growing leadership in understanding how misinformation spreads and how AI can help analyse online narratives responsibly.

As false or misleading claims become more sophisticated, the ability to detect subtle patterns in language and context is increasingly important. ClimateSense’s success shows how the OU, working with international partners, is helping shape the next generation of tools to meet that challenge.

(Image attribution: Emily Rand & LOTI / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)