This technology could surely be used for automated fact-checking. I’ve dreamed about the possibilities for automated fact-checking to improve online debate, and considered attempting to write it myself (using data sources like Wolfram Alpha and Google Public Data, and parsing natural language with a big dirty pile of regular expressions, which can’t be the best approach but it’s an approach I could attempt in a weekend).
For example, a program could examine a text for sentences matching “[X country] is [comparison] than [Y country]” and check that against online data sources. So if you’re typing a comment into reddit or wherever, it would first check your comment for claims it can parse, and alert you if you are mistaken about something so you can change it. And if you are correct about something, but didn’t supply a citation, it could add it in automatically.
This could have several awesome effects:
It would make online debates more accurate, spreading truth and knowledge.
It might set a standard of factual accuracy; people might come to expect assertions to be backed up with citations, and regard claims as suspicious if no supporting reference is provided.
Just knowing their facts will be checked (possibly by a future version of the software being re-run on old forum comments and highlighting inaccuracies for all to see) might make people more careful in their assertions.
If voice recognition technology improves, then this might eventually fact-check TV in real-time.
I wish I believed that it wouldn’t just lead to people seeding the online data sources with contradictory claims, causing such a fact-checker to return the equivalent of modern journalistic “we report; you decide” fact-agnostic reporting.
Still, the technology would be useful regardless.
A friend of mine, back in his MIT Media Lab days, was working on a “remembrance agent” that more or less worked along these lines but processed local hard drive content, to remind the user of previous conversations/projects/etc. related to what they’re currently working on.
What happened to the “remembrance agent” program? A quick search for the term finds the remem extension for emacs, which sounds similar. Might be good for the list of power tools on the wiki.
Apparently the project died for lack of corporate sponsorship; nobody could figure out how to make money with it. Eventually a similar project with a different orientation became a popular product for cross-linking related websites for advertising purposes.
Beats me; I assume he went on to work on other things. I just dropped him some email to ask him about it; I’ll let you know if I learn anything interesting.
This technology could surely be used for automated fact-checking. I’ve dreamed about the possibilities for automated fact-checking to improve online debate, and considered attempting to write it myself (using data sources like Wolfram Alpha and Google Public Data, and parsing natural language with a big dirty pile of regular expressions, which can’t be the best approach but it’s an approach I could attempt in a weekend).
For example, a program could examine a text for sentences matching “[X country] is [comparison] than [Y country]” and check that against online data sources. So if you’re typing a comment into reddit or wherever, it would first check your comment for claims it can parse, and alert you if you are mistaken about something so you can change it. And if you are correct about something, but didn’t supply a citation, it could add it in automatically.
This could have several awesome effects:
It would make online debates more accurate, spreading truth and knowledge.
It might set a standard of factual accuracy; people might come to expect assertions to be backed up with citations, and regard claims as suspicious if no supporting reference is provided.
Just knowing their facts will be checked (possibly by a future version of the software being re-run on old forum comments and highlighting inaccuracies for all to see) might make people more careful in their assertions.
If voice recognition technology improves, then this might eventually fact-check TV in real-time.
I wish I believed that it wouldn’t just lead to people seeding the online data sources with contradictory claims, causing such a fact-checker to return the equivalent of modern journalistic “we report; you decide” fact-agnostic reporting.
Still, the technology would be useful regardless.
A friend of mine, back in his MIT Media Lab days, was working on a “remembrance agent” that more or less worked along these lines but processed local hard drive content, to remind the user of previous conversations/projects/etc. related to what they’re currently working on.
What happened to the “remembrance agent” program? A quick search for the term finds the remem extension for emacs, which sounds similar. Might be good for the list of power tools on the wiki.
Apparently the project died for lack of corporate sponsorship; nobody could figure out how to make money with it. Eventually a similar project with a different orientation became a popular product for cross-linking related websites for advertising purposes.
Beats me; I assume he went on to work on other things. I just dropped him some email to ask him about it; I’ll let you know if I learn anything interesting.