Shion Guha

Automated Text Analysis of Fake News and Biased News

Research description:

Using Big Data, text analysis, and machine learning techniques, we will analyze how fake news and real news differ in their moral themes, cognitive styles, antiscience attitudes, emotional valence, and other psychological characteristics. Likewise, we will analyze how ideologically more biased news and less biased news differ on the various dimensions. To answer these questions with rigor and robustness, we will analyze about 7 million news articles from about 500 media outlets. The outlets vary widely in ideological leaning, from far left to far right. They also vary in veracity, from mostly fact-checked to mostly fake, conspiracy, and pseudoscience news. Our team has already completed preprocessing of all the news articles.

The SUDS Scholar will apply automated text analysis and machine learning techniques to these articles in order to identify linguistic patterns and biases depending on how fake or real and how left-leaning or right-leaning the media outlet is.

My last SUDS Scholar (Summer 2023) worked on the first stage of this project, presented our work at the Showcase, and won one of the two Best Oral Presentation Awards. This year’s SUDS Scholar (Summer 2024) will work on the full-fledged implementation of the project.

Year: 2024

Researcher:
Spike W.S. Lee, Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Students: 
Christopher Cao, University of Toronto
Rachel Way, Simon Fraser University

Through SUDS, undergraduate students engage in hands-on research focused on data sciences and AI methodology applications.

Bridging Administrative Decisions and Caseworker Narratives: A Computational Exploration of Child Welfare Practices

Research description:

The Children’s Aid Society of Toronto (CAST) is North America’s largest not-for-profit child welfare agency, with a legal mandate to protect children and youth from abuse and neglect. CAST provides essential services such as investigating protection needs, offering guidance and counselling to families, and facilitating permanency through adoption. CAST operates across the Greater Toronto Area and ensures that services are delivered through an equity lens, addressing the unique needs of children, youth, and families based on their race, culture, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. Through this project, CAST aims to address key operational challenges, such as understanding why some cases remain open for extended periods and why re-referrals occur after cases are closed. By analyzing the narrative data alongside administrative outcomes, the project will help CAST gain insights into decision-making processes at various stages of a child’s involvement with the system.

The anticipated social and economic benefits of the project for CAST include more efficient case management and improved decision-making frameworks, reducing the backlog of long-term cases and enhancing service delivery. This will lead to better outcomes for children and families by ensuring that decisions made during child protection investigations are well-informed and supported by comprehensive data analysis.

Year: 2025

Researcher:
Shion Guha, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

Students: 
Matthew Kyle Tamura, University of Toronto
Shan (Angelina) Zhai, University of Toronto

Through SUDS, undergraduate students engage in hands-on research focused on data sciences and AI methodology applications.

Participatory design of a dual-data decision support tool for child welfare

Research description:

The Children’s Aid Society of Toronto (CAST) is responsible for delivering high-quality child welfare services and supporting frontline workers who make complex, time-sensitive decisions affecting child safety and family wellbeing. While CAST has invested heavily in improving documentation practices and data systems, frontline staff still lack practical, accessible tools that help synthesize narrative case notes and administrative information into clear, actionable insights. As service needs grow and cases become more complex, CAST is exploring responsible, trauma-informed ways to integrate decision-support technologies that complement professional judgment. This project supports that priority by designing and prototyping an early-stage AI-supported decision-support tool tailored for ongoing case management. Building on CAST’s existing data infrastructure, the project focuses on translating CAST-identified needs into concrete interface features, usability requirements, and prototype components that can be tested in a controlled environment. By emphasizing participatory design and iterative feedback, the project ensures alignment with frontline workflows and organizational values. The anticipated benefits include improved decision consistency, reduced information overload for workers, clearer visibility into case trajectories, and foundational evidence needed for future, larger-scale evaluation studies. This project advances CAST’s strategic goal of developing responsible, evidence-informed innovations that enhance service quality and support better outcomes for children and families.

Year: 2026

Researcher:
Shion Guha, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

Students:
Matthew Kyle Tamura, University of Toronto
Minahil Bakhtawar, University of Toronto

Through SUDS, undergraduate students engage in hands-on research focused on data sciences and AI methodology applications.