Navigating Controversy as a Complex Search Task

Seeking information on a controversial topic is often a complex task, for both the user and the search engine. There are multiple subtleties involved with information seeking on controversial topics. Here we discuss some of the challenges in addressing these complex tasks, describing the spectrum between cases where there is a clear “right” answer, through fact disputes and moral debates, and discuss cases where search queries have a measurable effect on the well-being of people. We briefly survey the current state of the art, and the many open questions remaining, including both technical challenges and the possible ethical implications for search engine algorithms.

[1]  R. Kelly Garrett,et al.  Resisting Political Fragmentation on the Internet , 2011, Daedalus.

[2]  Gerhard Weikum,et al.  Harmony and dissonance: organizing the people's voices on political controversies , 2012, WSDM '12.

[3]  Paolo Ciuccarelli,et al.  Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles , 2015, CHI.

[4]  Ana-Maria Popescu,et al.  Detecting controversial events from twitter , 2010, CIKM.

[5]  Helen Nissenbaum,et al.  Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matters , 2000, Inf. Soc..

[6]  Elad Yom-Tov,et al.  On the link between media coverage of anorexia and pro-anorexic practices on the web. , 2014, The International journal of eating disorders.

[7]  Elad Yom-Tov,et al.  Information is in the eye of the beholder: Seeking information on the MMR vaccine through an Internet search engine , 2014, AMIA.

[8]  Jesse M. Shapiro,et al.  Ideological Segregation Online and Offline , 2010 .

[9]  Amy X. Zhang,et al.  Controversy and Sentiment in Online News , 2014, ArXiv.

[10]  Danai Koutra,et al.  Events and Controversies: Influences of a Shocking News Event on Information Seeking , 2014, WWW.

[11]  Eli Pariser,et al.  The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You , 2011 .

[12]  S. Dumais,et al.  Promoting Civil Discourse Through Search Engine Diversity , 2014 .

[13]  Ee-Peng Lim,et al.  On ranking controversies in wikipedia: models and evaluation , 2008, WSDM '08.

[14]  Daniele Quercia,et al.  Why individuals seek diverse opinions (or why they don't) , 2013, WebSci.

[15]  Mikalai Tsytsarau.  Scalable Detection of Sentiment-Based Contradictions , 2011 .

[16]  Aniket Kittur,et al.  He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia , 2007, CHI.

[17]  Alan Borning,et al.  Supporting reflective public thought with considerit , 2012, CSCW.

[18]  Ryen W. White,et al.  Content Bias in Online Health Search , 2014, TWEB.

[19]  Nora Hollenstein,et al.  Verb Polarity Frames: a New Resource and its Application in Target-specific Polarity Classification , 2014, KONVENS.

[20]  Shiri Dori-Hacohen,et al.  Detecting controversy on the web , 2013, CIKM.

[21]  Johann Gamper,et al.  MOUNA: mining opinions to unveil neglected arguments , 2012, CIKM '12.

[22]  Sean A. Munson,et al.  Presenting diverse political opinions: how and how much , 2010, CHI.

[23]  Floris Bex,et al.  ArguBlogging: An application for the Argument Web , 2014 .

[24]  Daniel Jurafsky,et al.  Linguistic Models for Analyzing and Detecting Biased Language , 2013, ACL.

[25]  C. Sunstein.  Republic.com 2.0 , 2007 .

[26]  Cass R. Sunstein,et al.  Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide , 2009 .

[27]  Divesh Srivastava,et al.  Fine-grained controversy detection in Wikipedia , 2015, 2015 IEEE 31st International Conference on Data Engineering.

[28]  Stefano DellaVigna,et al.  The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting , 2006 .

[29]  András Kornai,et al.  Edit Wars in Wikipedia , 2011, 2011 IEEE Third Int'l Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust and 2011 IEEE Third Int'l Conference on Social Computing.

[30]  Marie-Francine Moens,et al.  Clash of the Typings - Finding Controversies and Children's Topics Within Queries , 2011, ECIR.

[31]  Elad Yom-Tov,et al.  What makes a query difficult? , 2006, SIGIR.

[32]  B. Levine,et al.  Hope, Hype and Help: Ethically Assessing the Growing Market in Stem Cell Therapies , 2010, The American journal of bioethics : AJOB.

[33]  Dieter Frey,et al.  Recent Research on Selective Exposure to Information , 1986, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.

[34]  John Mark Agosta,et al.  Highlighting disputed claims on the web , 2010, WWW '10.

[35]  Denilson Barbosa,et al.  Identifying controversial articles in Wikipedia: a comparative study , 2012, WikiSym '12.

[36]  Reid Hastie,et al.  What Happened on Deliberation Day? , 2006 .

[37]  Shiri Dori-Hacohen,et al.  Automated Controversy Detection on the Web , 2015, ECIR.

[38]  Wei Zhang,et al.  Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources , 2015, Proc. VLDB Endow..

[39]  Alice H. Oh,et al.  User Evaluation of a System for Classifying and Displaying Political Viewpoints of Weblogs , 2009, ICWSM.

[40]  Dan Roth,et al.  BiasTrust: teaching biased users about controversial topics , 2012, CIKM '12.

[41]  Zhiying Xin,et al.  Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction , 2008 .

[42]  Sean A. Munson,et al.  Encouraging Reading of Diverse Political Viewpoints with a Browser Widget , 2013, ICWSM.

[43]  John W. Du Bois.  The stance triangle , 2007 .