michaelkeenan comments on ClearerThinking's Fact-Checking 2.0 - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Stefan_Schubert 22 October 2015 09:16PM

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Comment author: pico 22 October 2015 10:41:48PM 4 points [-]

I'm still fairly skeptical that algorithmically fact-checking anything complex is tractable today. The Google article states that "this is 100 percent theoretical: It’s a research paper, not a product announcement or anything equally exciting." Also, no real insights into nlp are presented; the article only suggests that an algorithm could fact check relatively simple statements that have clear truth values by checking a large database of information. So if the database has nothing to say about the statement, the algorithm is useless. In particular, such an approach would be unable to fact-check the Fiorina quote you used as an example.

Comment author: michaelkeenan 26 October 2015 11:22:05PM 0 points [-]

It would still be helpful to have automatic fact-checking of simple statements. Consider this Hacker News thread - two people are arguing about crime rates in the UK and USA. Someone says "The UK is a much more violent society than the US" and they argue about that, neither providing citations. That might be simple enough that natural language processing could parse it and check it against various interpretations of it. For example, one could imagine a bot that notices when people are arguing over something like that (whether on the internet or in a national election. It would provide useful relevant statistics, like the total violent crime rates in each country, or the murder rate, or whatever it thinks is relevant. If it were an ongoing software project, the programmers could notice when it's upvoted and downvoted, and improve it.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 27 October 2015 12:27:32AM 2 points [-]

Consider this Hacker News thread - two people are arguing about crime rates in the UK and USA.

This is harder than it seems. The two countries use different methodologies to collect their crime statistics.

Comment author: michaelkeenan 29 October 2015 03:20:59AM 0 points [-]

Yes, you'd want to use the International Crime Victims Survey. It's the standard way to compare crime rates between countries.