Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

A new application from Intel Labs aims at presenting consumers with opposing points of view to disputed claims made on web pages.

Here’s how it works: If you’ve seen on sites that claims the swine flu was overhyped, that the recent Iran presidential election was rigged, or that human cloning is inevitable — currently among the top claims investigated by Dispute Finder — you may be surprised to learn that the flu killed close to 150 people in Mexico alone, that shortly before the Iran vote Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was leading by a 2 to 1 margin, and that humans don’t appear to be quite as easy to duplicate as sheep and mice.

It’s an interesting experiment, in which the Intel Labs app — a Firefox extension — lets users scan web pages for highlighted claims in dispute and be directed to alternate points of view from trusted sources. Taking advantage of crowd-sourcing, users can contribute disputes, marking snippets of items as being in dispute on web pages, either in bulk or one by one, as well as add evidence to be used to support or oppose a claim from other web sites.

The system originally was set up based on manual marking, but a recent update to the web site was set to add artificial intelligence to the picture through “a machine learning algorithm that learns how to find snippets on the web that make a disputed claim, based on your examples,” according to the site’s blog. “You may notice a robot face and a percentage next to some snippets in the snippet search interface – this tells you how confident the learning algorithm is that the snippet is making the claim.” The new features for the Firefox add-on were going through the Mozilla review process.

It’s fun to give it a whirl. Take, for instance, finding the words (as I did at one web site) that, “Studies confirm that soy foods boost health at all ages!” Edamame fan though I am, I’d heard recently that some health professionals weren’t considering soy the miracle plant they once did, so I went ahead and clicked on the “this claim is disputed” icon.

At that point you are asked to choose from a list of existing claims the one that matches that which the snippet is making. In this that case popped up some curious, decidedly un-semantic matches, including a snippet about a computer retailer needing credit card info to confirm a transaction, a snippet that the US should have universal health care, and one that proposed that the health care bill proposes planned euthanasia. Not a soy comment among them, but that’s OK — you can create a new claim all on your own, which I did, labeling it “Soy is healthy no matter what.”

From there you can add web pages with supporting or opposing evidence and a representative quote from each (alas, I entered the wrong representative quote in one instance and there was no way to fix that but to delete it and start again).

Now, anytime someone on board with Dispute Finder happens across the site where the words about soy foods boosting health are highlighted, they can click on it and get a pop-up box featuring articles that have some additional and sometimes contrary information to provide additional perspective to this view. And, of course, chime in with their own back-ups on either side of the question. Again mining the crowd-sourcing phenomenon, users can vote up or down whether the evidence suggested is something they find to be credible.

In a world where many people are pretty much locked into their own viewpoints — and reading, watching, or listening to others who merely confirm that — Dispute Finder is a breath of fresh air. It’s a part of Intel’s Confrontational Computing project, which “aims to understand how people argue on the web, and to develop tools that make it easier for people to do so.” It poses that one outcome hopefully may be a world where tools make it easier for people to understand when and why other people hold opinions different to those that they read — and understanding each other better opens the door to some very good things.

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