It turned out there a huge volume of information out there already, that if I had read it before it would have helped me not lose money. Musat went on to investigate media mining. Perspectives is a platform that Musat developed after seven years of work and research. The next process the Perspectives platform goes through is extracting ideas found in these articles.
It can be a collection of keywords that have the same meaning in that specific context. Like NSA, Snowden, surveillance and so on. The platform then analyses phrase structures, assessing the semantics and its syntax. Articles that include nouns from controversial topics like surveillance, are combined with opinion words. Using this methodology, Musat said they are able to arrive at a relatively accurate figure, gauging the positive and negative opinions on a topic. Objectivity and impartiality is an on-going debate within the media.
How then does Musat and his research team deal with topics like global warming, where majority of academics agree that it is occurring? What we want to focus on is the controversial side. Users of the platform are able to read opposing opinions immediately.
Studies conducted by Musat and his colleagues show a willingness to read opposing opinions. In the control group we had this huge imbalance but in our group this was this was reduced to half. This is huge because there was this assumption that people will want to click and to see the opposite side, which is true people will do that.
The technology, Musat said, has major potential for journalism. He is currently in talks with major news publications, with the Perspectives platform being able to guage how partial a publication is on a particular topic.
