WISDOM: A web information analysis system

We present an information analysis system, WISDOM (Web Information Sensibly and Discreetly Ordered and Marshaled), which assists users in assessing the credibility of information on the Web from multiple viewpoints. A vast amount of information is now accumulated on the Web and becoming increasingly influential in people´s decision making. However, the Web contains a proliferation of false and misleading information. Thus, it is essential to study the methodologies and technologies that enable us to judge the credibility of information. It is for this reason that we have developed WISDOM, which organizes information on a given topic through the following three types of analysis: (1) extracting and contrasting important and controversial sentences around the points related to the topic, using semantics-oriented natural language processing (NLP) techniques; (2) identifying and classifying the authorship of each page; and (3) analyzing the appearance of each page, according to, for example, page design and writing style. WISDOM is in a state of continuous development, and in comparison to our previous demonstration at IUCS 2009, the current version of WISDOM is more advanced in the following respects. First, it extracts contrasting statements, in which statements contrasting the topic to other things, e.g., electric vehicles vs. hybrid electric vehicles. Second, it analyzes the expertise of information senders and indicates senders with high expertise with stars. Third, WISDOM analyzes a fresh 120 million Japanese Web pages; these pages are crawled and updated everyday by our crawler. WISDOM is available at http://wisdom-nict.go.jp/.