Highlighting disputed claims on the web

  • Authors:
  • Rob Ennals;Beth Trushkowsky;John Mark Agosta

  • Affiliations:
  • Intel Labs Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;Intel Labs Santa Clara, Santa Clara, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We describe Dispute Finder, a browser extension that alerts a user when information they read online is disputed by a source that they might trust. Dispute Finder examines the text on the page that the user is browsing and highlights any phrases that resemble known disputed claims. If a user clicks on a highlighted phrase then Dispute Finder shows them a list of articles that support other points of view. Dispute Finder builds a database of known disputed claims by crawling web sites that already maintain lists of disputed claims, and by allowing users to enter claims that they believe are disputed. Dispute Finder identifies snippets that make known disputed claims by running a simple textual entailment algorithm inside the browser extension, referring to a cached local copy of the claim database. In this paper, we explain the design of Dispute Finder, and the trade-offs between the various design decisions that we explored.