SoCS: Assessing Information Credibility Without Authoritative Sources

谣言、诽谤和阴谋论现在可以通过电子邮件、博客和其他社交媒体迅速传播。这类邮件的收件人不得质疑其有效性。此外，即使经过仔细的调查和思考，也不是每个人都会同意特定主张的有效性。这个项目将开发帮助人们对可信度进行个人评估的工具。这样做的目的不是依赖特定的消息来源作为基本事实的权威仲裁者，而是将“社会不可信”的程度降至最低。也就是说，该工具将识别“相似”人(经过仔细考虑，某人过去倾向于同意的人)不相信的断言，或者来自某人倾向于不同意的来源的断言。将开发一个在线媒体文本挖掘系统，以提取有争议的断言和用户对这些断言表达的信念。作为个性化声誉测量的一部分，关于常见断言的信念的比较以及对信念的撤回或更新将被跟踪。这项工作是正式解决基于文本挖掘和社会计算系统的信息可信度自动评估的第一次尝试。这些技术将为信息检索和声誉网络中许多具有挑战性的研究问题提供解决方案。这些技术广泛适用于内容的可信度和来源的声誉受到关注的其他领域，以帮助更广泛的信息消费者。原型工具将在高中免费发布和演示，从而培养人们对围绕公共利益主题的多样性信念的认识。

Rumors, smears, and conspiracy theories can now spread quickly through email, blogs, and other social media. Recipients of such messages may not question their validity. Moreover, even upon careful investigation and reflection, not everyone will agree about the validity of particular claims. This project will develop tools that help people make personal assessments of credibility. Rather than relying on particular sources as authoritative arbiters of ground truth, the goal is to minimize the amount of "social implausibility." That is, the tool will identify assertions that are disbelieved by "similar" people (those who, after careful consideration, someone tended to agree with in the past) or come from sources that someone has tended to disagree with. A text mining system for online media will be developed to extract controversial assertions and the beliefs expressed by users about those assertions. Comparisons of beliefs about common assertions, and retractions or updates to beliefs, will be tracked as part of personalized reputation measures.This work is the first attempt to formally address the automatic assessment of information credibility based on text mining and social computational systems. The techniques will provide the solution to many challenging research problems in information retrieval and reputation networks. The techniques are broadly applicable to other domains where the credibility of content and reputation of sources is a concern, to help a broad class of information consumers. Prototype tools will be released freely and demonstrated in high schools, thereby building awareness of the diversity of beliefs around topics of public interest.