Take articles mentioning Obama and Alinsky
Extract quotes by Obama: sometimes somewhat difficult, depending on article structure. In Obama's case, simply due to the volume of his speeches, it would be easy to extract a large high-confidence (but incomplete) corpus.
Find sentences within 2 words of references to Alinsky. Alternately, use plagiarism-detecting software to detect near-quotes (not plagiarized necessarily; this is a known application of such software) of Alinsky in Obama's speeches.
Apply known sentiment analysis techniques; probably insufficient due to the way political speech, compared to restaurant and product reviews, is structured.
Use a human to take as many of the top candidate quotes as possible and manually look over them. Still a lot easier than looking over the whole set of Obama related speeches and articles.
So this is easily done, just not easily done at scale with a couple specific barriers. Quote attribution and summarizing context of a quote, allusion or reference are probably the two biggest technical barriers.
I do appreciate that.
But I'm really interested in resources so easy as to seduce the blogger to whom all of that would be Greek.
I am interested, and would like to find others who are interested, in finding modest ways to make the electorate more rational, which I think is really in our best interest -- not just to make ourselves super-rational Bayesian black belts and all that, as valid a pursuit as that is.
How much AI technique could it possibly take for google (or something better) to do a decent job with
I.e. "speechby:" and "attitude:" don't exist, but could, I believe be implemented pretty accurately, to see in this case if we can find any instances of Obama praising Saul Alinsky.
An article: "Bill Ayers and Obama Both Quote Alinsky" claims such quotes exist, but their one attempt to demonstrate it is laughable -- something vaguely like a paraphrase of an Alinsky statement, but which has, in fact the reverse sense of what the supposed "original" meant. Yet I think most of the world, and not just conservatives, if they have any idea who Alinsky is, will tend not to question Obama's "debt" to Alinski -- just for the sheer number of times it's been said or implied. For the other shoe dropping, false quotes that help demonize Alinsky, see tinyurl.com/qa6fglk.
The point isn't to defend Obama. It is that I think the world would work better if the ratio of
ability to find verifiable facts pertinent to political discussion
supply of highly opinionated and slanted "news".
could be raised by, say, an order of magnitude.
So many assertions are made that are likely not true, but are incredibly difficult for the average person to disprove. In this Internet era, the personal cost to write some almost free associative screed about a political point is very low, while the personal cost of finding quite a lot of pertinent facts is awfully high.
This is not to say the "average person" will look for facts to confirm or contradict what they read, but much of what they read is written by bloggers some of whom are sincere and would become users of such resources, and I do believe the emotional rewards of finding a nugget of truth versus the current pain of often fruitless search would have an effect on people's thinking habits -- maybe small at first but growing over time.
The particular proposal merely illustrates one of many sorts of resource that are missing or hard to find. Ideas for other such resources would be welcome.