From Nuisance to News Sense: Augmenting the News with Cross-Document Evidence and Context

Abstract: Reading and understanding the stories in the news is increasingly difficult. Reporting on stories evolves rapidly, politicized news venues offer different perspectives (and sometimes different facts), and misinformation is rampant. However, existing solutions merely aggregate an overwhelming amount of information from heterogenous sources, such as different news outlets, social media, and news bias rating agencies. We present NEWSSENSE, a novel sensemaking tool and reading interface designed to collect and integrate information from multiple news articles on a central topic, using a form of reference-free fact verification. NEWSSENSE augments a central, grounding article of the user's choice by linking it to related articles from different sources, providing inline highlights on how specific claims in the chosen article are either supported or contradicted by information from other articles. Using NEWSSENSE, users can seamlessly digest and cross-check multiple information sources without disturbing their natural reading flow. Our pilot study shows that NEWSSENSE has the potential to help users identify key information, verify the credibility of news articles, and explore different perspectives.