Reference Information:
Title: Aspect-level News Browsing: Understanding News Events
from Multiple Viewpoints
Authors: Souneil Park, SangJeong Lee, Junehwa Song.
Venue: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.
Summary: The authors of this paper attempted to design a computer system of analyzing news feeds in order to determine their bias. Over time, the software can chart out a new source's bias, and report these findings to the user.
In addition to this, the software can find various news articles around a single event which contain a different biases, and present them to the user. This way, they can make sure that they more easily can be informed on all the differing viewpoints surrounding a controversial issue.
The results of the software are extremely optimistic. Users found that the news sources were more informative, and that they were able to more easily get an understanding of complex political issues.
Discussion: I found this research fairly interesting. In my own life however, I've noticed that people are generally set in their ways for a reason, and don't like reading other viewpoints. This is probably not a good thing in and of itself, but it would probably hinder the adoption of this system.
In addition to this not being overly helpful in tracking news events it also seems like it would simply create an environment for users to flame one another, essentially, doing the opposite of what they really want to get out of the system.
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