Japanese government prepares online lie-detector
Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is, for reasons best known to it, earmarking Y300 mn in its 2007 budget to produce what the Asahi Shimbun terms a lie-detector for online information.
The reality appears to be not so much that as an automated fact-checker that draws on related information to spot how likely something is to be a load of old balls. The Ministry envisages it being able to give you search results in order of their reliability, or tell you that a piece of info is 95% crap and ask if you'd still like to display it. Example questions they see it being able to answer include "is this company analysis on the mark?", "is this a natural-sounding description of the political situation within Lebanon?", or "are the functions of this overseas electrical appliance described accurately in this auction listing?".
They note that key hurdles will be whether they can find reliable internet-based sources of information related to a search, and develop technologies that can accurately assess meaning and provide high-level machine translation, amongst other things.
