Intelligent Government (iGov)
The Intelligent Government (iGov) research domain at GATE Institute is an interdisciplinary research initiative focused on computational disinformation analysis, digital governance, and democratic resilience.
Introduction
The team brings together experts in data science, cognitive science, political science, and linguistics to understand and counter false or manipulative information through computational social science and artificial intelligence.
Research goes beyond traditional fact-checking by analyzing rhetorical strategies, narrative structures, and socio-political impacts of manipulative discourse.
The initiative emphasizes:
- Multilingual analysis (particularly Bulgarian and English)
- Human–AI collaboration
- Scalable solutions for researchers, policymakers, journalists, and educators
GATE’s iGov team also leads the Bulgarian–Romanian Observatory on Digital Media (BROD) — a regional hub of 12 partners combating disinformation in Southeastern Europe.
Focus Areas
Detection, Ontology, and Data Infrastructure
Developing robust datasets and baseline AI models to support the detection of manipulative content and its structures.
Fallacy Detection Tool
An AI system for automatically identifying logical fallacies in text using a unified nine-class taxonomy, including a high-quality Bulgarian model based on XLM-RoBERTa.
Detection of Synthetic Content
Focuses on detecting machine-generated text and deepfakes in Bulgarian, adapting state-of-the-art tools for a low-resource language context.
Linguistic Data Spaces and Ontology Development
Developes a formal ontology for disinformation tailored to the Bulgarian context, initiated by adapting the established iFaIDet ontology.
Analytical Engine
Scaling Analysis with AI: Leveraging foundational tools to perform deep analysis at an unprecedented scale.
The PODIA Assistant
An AI-powered platform for political analysis that uses a RAG pipeline to evaluate texts against political science frameworks, providing a standardized method for deconstructing disinformation campaigns.
Macro-Level Threat Analysis
Informs a comparative framework for assessing a country’s vulnerability to cognitive warfare, measuring factors like Epistemic Infrastructure Decay.
Macro-Level Threat Analysis
Informs a comparative framework for assessing a country’s vulnerability to cognitive warfare, measuring factors like Epistemic Infrastructure Decay.
Targeted R&D Directions
Integration of Core Capabilities
Combining fallacy and synthetic content models as core components for higher-level analytical tools
Platform as an Integrator
The PODIA platform consolidates insights across analytical tools, providing multidimensional disinformation mapping
Empirically-Grounded Frameworks
The Cognitive Warfare framework draws on empirical data to inform resilience models and threat analysis
Calibrated Interventions
Designing data-driven media literacy initiatives based on empirically identified manipulation patterns
Strategic Collaborations
Active cooperation with GATE projects like B-Clear, ontology development, and Graph Neural Network initiatives
Team & Collaborators
Scientific Publications
Let’s collaborate
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