Short Biography

Vinay Setty is an associate professor at University of Stavanger and founder and CTO of Factiverse. Vinay Setty's research area broadly encompasses NLP, information retrieval and deep neural networks for language technologies,. He specializes in automated fact-checking, question answering, and conversational search. Currently, Vinay is dedicating a significant amount of his time to his startup, Factiverse with the mission to make credible information more accessible. He has published in several top-tier conferences within the area of information retrieval and web mining. He also won the 2020 SR Bank Innovation prize for commercialising neural network technology for fake news detection. He is the PI of a research lab on automated fact-checking at the University of Stavanger, currently with 2 PhD students and 5 master's students, and is deputy leader of the Information Access & Artificial Intelligence (IAI) research group at UiS. He has a PhD from University of Oslo and a postdoc from Max-Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany.

Projects

MediaFutures Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation, headed by University of Bergen, Norway — Work Package 3 leader since 2026.

Students

I am the PI of a research lab on automated fact-checking at the University of Stavanger. In 2026 the lab has 2 PhD students and 5 master's students.

PhD Students

• Peter Røysland Aarnes — Explainable AI for fact-checking
• Pratuat Amatya — Agentic fact-checking

Master's Students (2026)

• Erik Martin
• Swain Shrestha
• William Vo
• Marius Hauge Håland
• Andreas Pedersen

Master's Theses Supervised

• [2026] Swain Shrestha — Automatic Verification of Image-Text Claims with Evidence from the Web
• [2026] Andreas Pedersen, Marius Hauge Håland — Detecting Misinformation in Short-Form Videos
• [2026] Erik Martin — Multilingual Audio Embeddings for Speaker Identification
• [2026] Hoang-Ny William Vo Nguyen — Recommending credible debunking videos to counter misinformation
• [2025] Henrik Vatndal — Fact Checking TikTok
• [2025] Malin Astrid Larsson, Harald Fosen Grunnaleite — Multi-task Learning for Fact-checking Tasks
• [2024] Bhakti Prabhu — A Comprehensive Approach to Automated Fact-Checking of Podcasts
• [2023] Adam James Becker — Automated Fact-Checking of Podcasts
• [2023] Dag Hermann Valvik — Human-Guided Phasic Policy Gradient in Minecraft: Exploring Deep Reinforcement Learning with Human Preferences in Complex Environments
• [2023] Audun Stjernelund Lien — Machine learning to detect corporate greenwashing
• [2022] Ole Petter Nilsen — Conversational AI for Serving Fact-Checks
• [2022] Adil Khurshid, Apoorva Ramesh — Fact Checking using Knowledge Bases
• [2022] Bjørn Christian Weinbach — Fairness and Interpretability in Machine Learning Models
• [2021] Bjarte Botnevik — Fake News Data Generation and Augmentation
• [2020] Markus Fjellheim — Analyse og presentasjon av Mars rover data
• [2020] Henrik Mjaaland — Detecting Fake News and Rumors in Twitter Using Deep Neural Networks
• [2020] Nguyen Khoa Le — Generative adversarial networks for bias flipping
• [2020] Vladyslav Maksyk — Scaling Network Embeddings
• [2020] Nils Magne Fossåen — Semi-supervised learning for classification of Nordic news articles
• [2019] Priyanka Chennam Lakhsmikumar — Fake News Detection A Deep Neural Network
• [2019] Magnus Særsten Book — Generating Retro Video Game Music Using Deep Learning Techniques
• [2019] Fredrik Wigsnes — Predicting popularity of Reddit posts using machine learning
• [2018] Mats Jonassen — Adaptive Selection and Delivery of Rich Media Notifications to Mobile Users
• [2018] Erlend Rekve — Automated false claims detection using deep neural networks
• [2018] Denys Chechelnytskyy — Deep neural models to represent news events
• [2018] Junaid Alam — Graph-based Entity Recognition & Inference and Link Prediction in static Network

Bachelor's Theses

• [2025] Jonas Ådland Thowsen, Sveinung Johansen Wathne — An Agentic Approach to Automated Fact-Checking in Encrypted Messaging Applications
• [2025] Mathias Elstrøm, Sanjai Vijeyaratnam — Annoteringsverktøy for bygging av datasett for faktasjekking av maskinlæringsmodeller
• [2025] Daniel Øverland, Vegar Kleiva Hauge — Application to Verify Multimodal Content, Live-Streams, Video-Recordings, Audio-Clips and Real-Time Data
• [2024] Andreas Pedersen, Marius Hauge Håland — Browser plugin for fact-checking
• [2024] Marit Alfarnes Holtermann, Lea Zalar Pettersen — Interactive fact-checking application for Factiverse
• [2024] Geir Inge Hagen Dahle, Sander Meling Langeteig, Daniel Meihack Thu — Visualization of news articles in Factiverse editor
• [2023] Daniel Alvsåker — Agil Utvikling av et Modulært System for Ferie- og Avspaseringshåndtering
• [2023] Odin Fasteland Blikeng, Tore Henriksen Eliassen — Gamifying Fact-Checking: Development of a Personalised Dashboard for Factiverse Applications
• [2023] Henrik Aadnøy, Thomas Fredhall Holguin, Anders Theodor Andreassen Lindemark — Slackbot for crowdsourcing av maskinlærings-oppgaver
• [2022] Mats Erik Nielsen, Erik Martin — Claim detection data annotation tool
• [2021] Minh Christian Tran, Karam Tamim Yanis — Mobile ios/Android app for fake news detection game
• [2021] Mustafa Hersi, Kevin Ratdal — Smart tekst redigering/utvidelse for fakta sjekk
• [2021] Awalle Mohamed, Jone Aabø Lorentzen, Ramtin Hafezinejad — Social Media coverage of the fake news

Teaching

• [2026-present] Generative AI (Masters course) Course Page
• [2017-2025] Data Mining and Deep Learning (Masters course - Spring semesters) Course Page
• [2019-present] Advanced Programming (Bachelors course - Fall semesters) Course Page
• [2017 - 2019] Operating Systems (University of Stavanger)
• [Spring 2017] Data Mining for IT-VEST (Aalborg University)
• [Summer 2016] Advanced Topics in Information Retrieval (Saarland University)
• [Summer 2015] Seminar on Massive-Scale Graph Analysis (Saarland University)

Past Positions

• [November 2016 - July 2017] Assistant Professor, Aalborg University, Denmark
• [September 2014 - October 2016] Postdoctoral Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbruecken, Germany
• [September 2012 - February 2013] Visiting Researcher, Spotify, Stockholm
• [June 2005 - March 2008] Software Engineer, Electronics For Imaging, Bangalore, India

Publications

For more up to date list of publications see: DBLP, Google Scholar
• Effectiveness of Sparse Retrieval for Automated Fact-Checking
  Ritvik Setty, Vinay Setty
  in ICTIR 2026
  DOI
• One LLM to Train Them All: Multi-task Learning Framework for Fact-Checking
  Malin Astrid Larsson, Harald Fosen Grunnaleite, Vinay Setty
  in ECIR 2026
  DOI, arXiv
• The CLEF-2026 CheckThat! Lab: Advancing Multilingual Fact-Checking
  Julia Maria Struß, Sebastian Schellhammer, Stefan Dietze, Venktesh V, Vinay Setty, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Preslav Nakov, Avishek Anand, Primakov Chungkham, Salim Hafid, Dhruv Sahnan, Konstantin Todorov
  in ECIR 2026
  DOI
• Multilingual Fact-Checking at Scale: Fine-Tuned Compact Models vs LLMs
  Pratuat Amatya, Vinay Setty
  arXiv preprint 2026
  arXiv
• NumPert: Numerical Perturbations to Probe Language Models for Veracity Prediction
  Peter Røysland Aarnes, Vinay Setty
  in IJCNLP-AACL 2025 (Student Research Workshop)
  arXiv
• ShortCheck: Checkworthiness Detection of Multilingual Short-Form Videos
  Henrik Vatndal, Vinay Setty
  in IJCNLP-AACL 2025 (System Demonstrations)
  arXiv
• Think Right, Not More: Test-Time Scaling for Numerical Claim Verification
  Primakov Chungkham, Venktesh V, Vinay Setty, Avishek Anand
  in EMNLP 2025 (Findings)
  DOI, arXiv
• Overview of the CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Lab: Subjectivity, Fact-Checking, Claim Normalization, and Retrieval
  Firoj Alam, Julia Maria Struß, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Stefan Dietze, Salim Hafid, Katerina Korre, Arianna Muti, Preslav Nakov, Federico Ruggeri, Sebastian Schellhammer, Vinay Setty, Megha Sundriyal, Konstantin Todorov, Venktesh V
  in CLEF 2025
  DOI
• Overview of the CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Lab Task 3 on Fact-Checking Numerical Claims
  Venktesh V, Vinay Setty, Avishek Anand, Boushra Bendou, Maram Hasanain, Houda Bouamor, Gabriel Iturra-Bocaz, Petra Galuščáková, Firoj Alam
  in CLEF 2025 (Working Notes)
  PDF
• Factiverse and IAI at CheckThat! 2025: Adaptive In-Context Learning for Claim Extraction
  Pratuat Amatya, Vinay Setty
  in CLEF 2025 (Working Notes)
  PDF
• The CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Lab: Subjectivity, Fact-Checking, Claim Normalization, and Retrieval
  Firoj Alam, Julia Maria Struß, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Stefan Dietze, Salim Hafid, Katerina Korre, Arianna Muti, Preslav Nakov, Federico Ruggeri, Sebastian Schellhammer, Vinay Setty, Megha Sundriyal, Konstantin Todorov, Venktesh V
  in ECIR 2025
  DOI
• FlashCheck: Exploration of Efficient Evidence Retrieval for Fast Fact-Checking
  Kevin Nanhekhan, Venktesh V, Erik Martin, Henrik Vatndal, Vinay Setty, Avishek Anand
  in ECIR 2025
  DOI, arXiv
• Annotation Tool and Dataset for Fact-Checking Podcasts
  Vinay Setty, Adam James Becker
  in WWW 2025 (Companion)
  DOI, arXiv
• FactIR: A Real-World Zero-shot Open-Domain Retrieval Benchmark for Fact-Checking
  Venktesh V, Vinay Setty
  in WWW 2025 (Companion)
  DOI, arXiv
• LiveFC: A System for Live Fact-Checking of Audio Streams
  Venktesh V, Vinay Setty
  in WSDM 2025 (Demo)
  DOI, arXiv
• Fact-checking Multilingual Podcasts
  Vinay Setty
  in WSDM 2025
  DOI
• DISCO: DISCovering Overfittings as Causal Rules for Text Classification Models
  Zijian Zhang, Vinay Setty, Yumeng Wang, Avishek Anand
  in MAI-XAI @ ECAI 2024
  PDF, arXiv
• Claim Check-Worthiness in Podcasts: Challenges and Opportunities for Human-AI Collaboration to Tackle Misinformation
  Ujwal Gadiraju, Vinay Setty, Stefan Buijsman
  in HCOMP 2024 (Works-in-Progress)
• QuestGen: Effectiveness of Question Generation Methods for Fact-Checking Applications
  Ritvik Setty, Vinay Setty
  in CIKM 2024 (Short paper)
  DOI, arXiv
• IAI Group at CheckThat! 2024: Transformer Models and Data Augmentation for Checkworthy Claim Detection
  Peter Røysland Aarnes, Vinay Setty, Petra Galuščáková
  in CLEF 2024 (Working Notes)
  PDF, arXiv
• The Surprising Effectiveness of Rankers Trained on Expanded Queries
  Abhijit Anand, Venktesh V, Vinay Setty, Avishek Anand
  in SIGIR 2024
  DOI, arXiv
• QuanTemp: A Real-World Open-Domain Benchmark for Fact-Checking Numerical Claims
  Venktesh V, Abhijit Anand, Avishek Anand, Vinay Setty
  in SIGIR 2024
  DOI, arXiv
• FactCheck Editor: Multilingual Text Editor with End-to-End Fact-Checking
  Vinay Setty
  in SIGIR 2024 (Demo)
  DOI, arXiv
• Surprising Efficacy of Fine-Tuned Transformers for Fact-Checking over Larger Language Models
  Vinay Setty
  in SIGIR 2024 (Industry Track)
  DOI, arXiv
• PKG API: A Tool for Personal Knowledge Graph Management
  Nolwenn Bernard, Ivica Kostric, Weronika Łajewska, Krisztian Balog, Petra Galuščáková, Vinay Setty, Martin G. Skjæveland
  in WWW 2024 (Companion)
  DOI, arXiv
• Trustworthy Journalism through AI
  Andreas L. Opdahl, Bjørnar Tessem, Duc-Tien Dang-Nguyen, Enrico Motta, Vinay Setty, Eivind Throndsen, Are Tverberg, Christoph Trattner
  in Data & Knowledge Engineering 2023
  DOI
• Extreme Classification for Answer Type Prediction in Question Answering
  Vinay Setty
  in JCDL 2023
  DOI, arXiv
• Context Aware Query Rewriting for Text Rankers using LLM
  Abhijit Anand, Venktesh V, Vinay Setty, Avishek Anand
  arXiv preprint 2023
  arXiv
• Query Understanding in the Age of Large Language Models
  Avishek Anand, Venktesh V, Abhijit Anand, Vinay Setty
  arXiv preprint 2023
  arXiv
• Making Sense of Nonsense: Integrated Gradient-Based Input Reduction to Improve Recall for Check-Worthy Claim Detection
  Ghazaal Sheikhi, Andreas L. Opdahl, Samia Touileb, Vinay Setty
  in NAIS 2023
  PDF
• Report on the 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022): The First Major Hybrid IR Conference
  Krisztian Balog, Kjetil Nørvåg, Vinay Setty
  in ACM SIGIR Forum 2022
  DOI
• Towards Formally Grounded Evaluation Measures for Semantic Parsing-based Knowledge Graph Question Answering
  Trond Linjordet, Krisztian Balog, Vinay Setty
  in ICTIR 2022
  DOI
• SparCAssist: A Model Risk Assessment Assistant Based on Sparse Generated Counterfactuals
  Zijian Zhang, Vinay Setty, Avishek Anand
  in SIGIR 2022 (Demo)
  DOI, arXiv
• A General and Configurable Framework for Blockchain-based Marketplaces
  Andrea Merlina, Roman Vitenberg, Vinay Setty
  in ACM SAC 2022
  DOI, arXiv
• Advances in Information Retrieval — 44th European Conference on IR Research (ECIR 2022), Stavanger, Norway, Proceedings Parts I and II
  Matthias Hagen, Suzan Verberne, Craig Macdonald, Christin Seifert, Krisztian Balog, Kjetil Nørvåg, Vinay Setty (editors)
  Springer LNCS 2022
  Part I, Part II
• A Comparative Study for Unsupervised Network Representation Learning
  Megha Khosla, Vinay Setty, Avishek Anand
  in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 2021
  DOI, arXiv
• The University of Stavanger (IAI) at the TREC 2021 Conversational Assistance Track
  Ivica Kostric, Krisztian Balog, Magnus Book, Trond Linjordet, Vinay Setty
  in TREC 2021
  PDF
• BRENDA: Browser Extension for Fake News Detection
  Bjarte Botnevik, Eirik Sakariassen, Vinay Setty
  in SIGIR 2020 (Demo)
  DOI, arXiv
• ICTIR '20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval
  Krisztian Balog, Vinay Setty, Christina Lioma, Yiqun Liu, Min Zhang, Klaus Berberich (editors)
  ACM 2020
  DOI
• Deep Neural Architectures for Detecting False Claims
  Vinay Jayarama Setty, Rahul Mishra
  US Patent 10,803,387 (2020)
  Patent
• Semantic Answer Type Prediction using BERT IAI at the ISWC SMART Task 2020.
  Vinay Setty, Krisztian Balog
  SMART@ISWC 2020: 10-18
  PDF
• Truth be Told: Fake News Detection Using User Reactions on Reddit
  Vinay Setty, Erlend Rekve
  in CIKM 2020 (Poster)
  PDF
• Efficient Continuous Multi-Query Processing over Graph Streams
  Lefteris Zervakis, Vinay Setty, Christos Tryfonopoulos and Katja Hose
  in EDBT 2020
  PDF
• Proceedings of the 13th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-Based Systems (DEBS 2019)
  Boris Koldehofe, Erwan Le Merrer, Vinay Setty, Guido Salvaneschi (editors)
  ACM 2019
  DOI
• SADHAN: Hierarchical Attention Networks to Learn Latent Aspect Embeddings for Fake News Detection
  Rahul Mishra and Vinay Setty
  in ICTIR 2019
  PDF
• Distributed and Dynamic Clustering for News Events
  Vinay Setty
  in DEBS 2018
  DOI
• Top-K Diversification for Path Queries in Knowledge Graphs
  Christian Aebeloe, Vinay Setty, Gabriela Montoya, Katja Hose
  in ISWC 2018 (Posters & Demos)
  PDF
• Event2Vec: Neural Embeddings for News Events
  Vinay Setty and Katja Hose
  in SIGIR 2018 (Short paper)
  PDF
• Discovering Diversified Paths in Knowledge Bases.
  Christian Aebeloe, Gabriela Montoya, Vinay Setty and Katja Hose
  in VLDB 2018 (Demo paper)
  PDF
• Estimating Event Focus Time Using Neural Word Embeddings
  Supratim Das, Arunav Mishra, Klaus Berberich and Vinay Setty
  in CIKM 2017 (Short paper).
• BioNex: A System For Biomedical News Event Exploration
  Patrick Ernst, Arunav Mishra, Avishek Anand, Vinay Setty
  in SIGIR-Demo 2017.
  PDF
• Modeling Event Importance for Ranking Daily News Events
  Vinay Setty, Abhijit Anand, Arunav Mishra, Avishek Anand
  in WSDM 2017. PDF, Results
• RichNote: Adaptive Selection and Deliver of Rich Media Notifications to Mobile Users
  Md Yusuf Sarwar Uddin, Vinay Setty, Ye Zhao, Roman Vitenberg, Nalini Venkatasubramanian
  in ICDCS 2016. (PDF)
• Finding Diverse Needles in a Haystack of Comments - Social Media Exploration for News
  Hang Zhang, Vinay Setty
  in WebSci 2016.
  PDF
• As Time Goes By: Comprehensive Tagging of Textual Phrases with Temporal Scopes
  Erdal Kuyez, Vinay Setty, Jannik Stroetgen, Gerhard Weikum
  in WWW 2016.
  PDF
• Temponym Tagging: Temporal Scopes for Textual Phrases
  Erdal Kuzey, Jannik Strötgen, Vinay Setty, Gerhard Weikum
  in WWW 2016 (Companion)
  DOI
• Towards Publish/Subscribe Functionality on Graphs
  Lefteris Zervakis, Christos Tryfonopoulos, Vinay Setty, Stephan Seufert and Spiros Skiadopoulos
  in DIACHRON 2016 (co-located with EDBT 2016).
• Exploring Long Running News Stories using Wikipedia
  Jaspreet Singhy, Abhijeet Anand, Vinay Setty, Avishek Anand
  in Web Science 2015
  PDF
• Towards content-based publish/subscribe for distributed social networks
  Christos Tryfonopoulos, Paraskevi Raftopoulou, Vinay Setty, Argiris Xiros
  in DEBS 2015
• VizPub: Visualizing the Performance of Overlay-Based Pub/Sub Systems
  Nils Peder Korsveien, Vinay Setty, Roman Vitenberg
  in DEBS 2014. (Best Demo Award)
  PDF
• Cost-Effective Resource Allocation for Deploying Pub/Sub on Cloud
  Vinay Setty, Roman Vitenberg, Gunnar Kreitz, Guido Urdaneta, Maarten van Steen
  in ICDCS 2014.
• Maximizing the Number of Satisfied Subscribers in Pub/Sub Systems Under Capacity Constraints
  Vinay Setty, Gunnar Kreitz, Guido Urdaneta, Roman Vitenberg, Maarten van Steen
  in Infocom 2014.
• The hidden Pub/Sub of Spotify
  Vinay Setty, Gunnar Kreitz, Roman Vitenberg, Maarten van Steen, Guido Urdaneta, and Staffan Gimåker
  in DEBS 2013.
  PDF
• PolderCast: Fast, Robust, and Scalable Architecture for P2P Topic-based Pub/Sub
  Vinay Setty, Maarten van Steen, Roman Vitenberg, and Spyros Voulgaris
  in Middleware 2012.
• InZeit: Efficiently Identifying Insightful Time Points
  Vinay Setty, Srikanta Bedathur, Klaus Berberich, and Gerhard Weikum
  in VLDB 2010.
• Hadoop++: Making a Yellow Elephant Run Like a Cheetah (Without It Even Noticing)
  Jens Dittrich, Jorge Quiane, Alekh Jindal, Yagiz Kargin, Vinay Setty, Jörg Schad
  in VLDB 2010.

Education

• September, 2010 - August, 2014
  Ph. D.
  Thesis title: Publish/Subscribe for Large-Scale Social Interaction: Design, Analysis and Resource Provisioning [pdf]
  Supervisors: Prof. Roman Vitenberg, Prof. Maarten van Steen
  University of Oslo
• MSc.
  Efficiently Identifying Interesting Time-points in Text Archives [pdf]
  Supervisor: Prof. Dr-Ing. Gerhard Weikum, Advisors: Dr. Srikanta Bedathur and Dr-Ing. Klaus Berberich
  Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarland University
  

Copyright © 2026 Vinay Setty