Japan Government Funds (300 M) Online BullS*** Detector

Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is earmarking Y300 million in its 2007 budget to produce what the Asahi Shimbun terms a lie-detector for online information.

It would be an automated fact-checker that draws on related information to spot how likely something is to be a load of bull. 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. via

Even at an elementary level this can go a long way in separating quality websites from garbage. However there is always the mega problem of false positives. I can see search engines like Google taking an active interest in this venture.