truth discovery doccumentation

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1. INTRODUCTION


1.1. INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT

THE World Wide Web has become a necessary part of our lives and might have become the most important information source for most people. Everyday, people retrieve all kinds of information from the Web. For example, when shopping online, people find product specifications from websites like Amazon.com or ShopZilla.com. When looking for interesting DVDs, they get information and read movie reviews on websites such as NetFlix.com or IMDB.com. When they want to know the answer to a certain question, they go to Ask.com or Google.com. “Is the World Wide Web always trustable?” Unfortunately, the answer is “no.” There is no guarantee for the correctness of information on the Web. Even worse, different websites often provide conflicting information, as shown in the following examples.

Suppose a user is interested in how high Mount Everest is and queries Ask.com with “What is the height of Mount Everest?” Among the top 20 results,1 he or she will find the following facts: four websites (including Ask.com itself) say 29,035 feet, five websites say 29,028 feet, one says 29,002 feet, and another one says 29,017 feet. Which answer should the user trust?

We tried to find out who wrote the book Rapid Contextual Design (ISBN: 0123540518). We found many different sets of authors from different online bookstores, and from the image of the book cover, we found that A1 Books provides the most accurate information. In comparison, the information from Powell’s books is incomplete, and that from Lakeside books is incorrect.



1.2. PROBLEM STATEMENT:

In this paper, we study the problem of finding true facts in a certain domain. Here, a domain refers to a property of a certain type of objects, such as authors of books or number of pixels of camcorders. The input of TRUTHFINDER is a large number of facts in a domain that are provided by many websites. There are usually multiple conflicting facts from different websites for each object, and the goal of TRUTHFINDER is to identify the true fact among them.

Based on common sense and our observations on real data, we have four basic heuristics that serve as the base of our computational model.

Heuristic 1. Usually there is only one true fact for a property of an object.


1.3. OBJECTIVES:

There are three main objectives.First, we formulate the Veracity problem about how to discover true facts from conflicting information. Second, we propose a framework to solve this problem, by defining the trustworthiness of websites, confidence of facts, and influences between facts. Finally, we propose an algorithm called TRUTHFINDER for identifying true facts using iterative methods. Our experiments show that TRUTHFINDER achieves very high accuracy in discovering true facts, and it can select better trustworthy websites than authority-based search engines such as Google.


1.4. APPLICATIONS:

By using the TRUTHFINDER algorithm we can identify the true facts with great amount of confidence and know the trustworthiness of the websites.The credibility of the information present on the internet will also increase.