Friday, December 17, 2004

More excitement

Here is a text mining presentation about trying to automatically tag website bias.

2 comments:

Brian said...

Very interesting. I understood this much better than your thesis preview. What to you think would be the practical application of perfecting this? Would this not tend to support further polarization of the populace, as I would now be able to thoroughly insulate myself from reading things put out by the other guys? Or, when the other guys come to power, won't they be able to send their goons looking for me on the finger-print I have left in my search for information? Will I be able to hire a web-company to trace my enemy's movements and give me a standards based number on their ideology?

serapio said...

We've had a few discussions about what people would actually use this for. I originally thought people would generally want to read the neutral sites, but it may indeed be that people would want to read just sites with bias like their own. It may also be that people want to read sites with bias like their own, but have it called unbiased.

Part of the confusion, I think, is that bias involves three distinct things that may not always go together--predisposition to having a particular opinion, showing favor to it, and doing so in an 'unfair' way. Most people would like to avoid reading the latter, but the first is acceptable and the second is generally seen favorably, especially in political blogs.