Dispute Finder Browser Extension Available
Firefox Add-On Helps People Identify Biased Information
Jul 17, 2009
Have you ever read something on the internet and wished you could dispute it with your own evidence or find alternative viewpoints?
By going to the Dispute Finder home page, internet users can do just that by searching disputed claims to see what alternative viewpoints exist on a given topic. This new on-line tool is the main result of the Confrontational Computing project, a collaboration between Intel Research and the University of California at Berkeley.
Those users that sign-up for a free log-in and download the Firefox extension will also be able to:
- Highlight a claim they wish to dispute by selecting text or a "snippet", right clicking, and following the menu prompts
- Add websites as evidence of new or existing claims
- Receive a pop-up notification in their web browser when they access a website that has a previous disputed claim
The tool is currently in beta version and has some bugs to work out, however, there is a link to send feedback in order to help members navigate its use.
Answering that feedback is Rob Ennals, research scientist and project team member at Intel Research Berkeley in California. In a phone interview on July 15, 2009, he outlines some of the project results and future directions for Dispute Finder. At this time, approximately 7000 people have installed Dispute Finder, 100 of those people have marked snippets, and 100 people have created new claims.
“The goal of this release was to get the idea out there and let people play with it,” explains Ennals, “We don’t expect to see really large-scale take up until we have improved the user interface, got the machine learning working, and boosted the size of the database.”
When these things are in place, Dispute Finder will be improved to allow a user to rapidly mark thousands of snippets. Future versions will be able to cover much larger portions of the web with disputed claims by using AI technology to find similar claims and mark them. The project also plans to incorporate the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowd-sourcing web service, to create a database of disputed claims.
Implications for Gathering Information on the Web
There are implications for any professional that needs to gather information from the web. Journalists, researchers, teachers, agencies that gather intelligence - all stand to see benefits in being able to quickly and effectively have access to alternative perspectives of an issue. As self-publishing proliferates, the access to alternative points of view increases, however, the downside seems to be that more of that information is one-sided.
"There are more publications with differing points of view, but that doesn't necessarily mean that people are reading them," explains Ennals. Since not all sources are equally trustworthy, another future plan for Dispute Finder will deal with evaluating sources of information.
Dispute Finder members can expect to see some of these improvements starting in September 2009 and are projected to continue for at least a year. Until then, the current version is well worth the time to anybody that seeks to be better informed about the issues they care about.
What does Ennals wish everybody knew about Dispute Finder?
"That it's awesome," he concludes.
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