III: Small: Topical Positioning System (TPS) for Informed Reading of Web Pages

这项工作解决了提高人们在Web上查找信息(包括有关医疗保健、政策或任何其他广泛讨论的主题的信息)的批判性素养的挑战。主题定位系统“TPS”的拟议研究推动了开发一种浏览器工具的愿景，该工具可以向人们显示他们面前的网页是否讨论了一个挑衅性的主题，该材料是否以严重偏见的方式呈现，它是否代表了一种异类(边缘)想法，以及它对问题的讨论如何与更广泛的背景和“熟悉的”来源中提供的信息相关联。本研究将文本分析和比较技术应用于这一问题，并对其进行了扩展。它使用统计语言建模、主题建模、机器学习和链接分析技术来表示Web页面和Web页面集群。它既需要离线前处理来组织网络规模的收集，也需要在线、查询时对组织进行微调，以便在TPS浏览器附加组件中呈现。这项研究将是课程项目和研究生研究的基础，使大量学生接触到基于网络的搜索和信息的批判性评估问题。然而，更重要的是，这项工作有可能影响许多人，帮助他们根据在网络和其他地方读到的内容做出更明智的选择。该项目的结果将在同行评议的场所公布，并在项目网站(http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/research/tps).)上列出免费提供的TPS浏览器插件将在此网站上提供。

This work addresses the challenge of increasing the critical literacy of people looking for information on the Web, including information regarding healthcare, policy, or any other broadly discussed topic. The proposed research on Topical Positioning System "TPS" drives the vision of developing a browser tool that shows a person whether the web page in front of them discusses a provocative topic, whether the material is presented in a heavily biased way, whether it represents an outlier (fringe) idea, and how its discussion of issues relates to the broader context and to information presented in "familiar" sources. This research applies and extends text analysis and comparison techniques to this problem. It uses statistical language modeling, topic modeling, machine learning, and link analysis techniques to represent Web pages and clusters of Web pages. It requires both off-line pre-processing to organize web-scale collections and on-line, query-time fine-tuning of the organization for presentation in a TPS browser add-on. This research will be the foundation of class projects as well as graduate student research, exposing a large number of students to issues of web-based search and critical evaluation of information. More importantly, however, this work has the potential to impact many people, helping them make more informed choices in response to what they read on the Web and elsewhere. The results of this project will be published in peer-reviewed venues and listed at the project Web site (http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/research/tps). A freely available TPS browser add-on will be available at this Web site.