Show me the material evidence: Initial experiments on evaluating hypotheses from user-generated multimedia data
This work addresses the need for cognitive computing systems to handle popular subjective queries, though it is incremental as it focuses on initial experiments and challenges.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating subjective hypotheses using user-generated multimedia data as evidence, presenting two preliminary experiments and discussing challenges for aggregating evidence into collective decisions.
Subjective questions such as `does neymar dive', or `is clinton lying', or `is trump a fascist', are popular queries to web search engines, as can be seen by autocompletion suggestions on Google, Yahoo and Bing. In the era of cognitive computing, beyond search, they could be handled as hypotheses issued for evaluation. Our vision is to leverage on unstructured data and metadata of the rich user-generated multimedia that is often shared as material evidence in favor or against hypotheses in social media platforms. In this paper we present two preliminary experiments along those lines and discuss challenges for a cognitive computing system that collects material evidence from user-generated multimedia towards aggregating it into some form of collective decision on the hypothesis.