=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2079/paper3
|storemode=property
|title=Shaping the Information Nutrition Label
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2079/paper3.pdf
|volume=Vol-2079
|authors=Tim Gollub,Martin Potthast,Benno Stein
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ecir/GollubPS18
}}
==Shaping the Information Nutrition Label==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2079/paper3.pdf
Shaping the Information Nutrition Label
Tim Gollub1 Martin Potthast2 Benno Stein1
1 2
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar Leipzig University
tim.gollub@uni-weimar.de martin.potthast@uni-leipzig.de
benno.stein@uni-weimar.de
Abstract
17 32 31 64 B
We take up on the idea of a nutrition facts min °C % dB class
label for online documents: the Information
Nutrition Label. Such a label has the poten- Figure 1: Visual representation of the proposed label.
tial to increase the readers’ ability to make Time, temperature, transparency, volume, and credibility
an informed decision before the “consumption” are taken as quantities to describe the nutrition facts of a
of a news article or some other published on- document.
line document. The basic ideas along with the unaware of alternative arguments and opinions. Fur-
dimensions (manifest, measurable text qual- thermore, part of the news articles are spread not only
ities, etc.) of such a label were proposed in for the purpose of informing people but come with
[FGG+ 17]. The paper in hand focuses on the a commercial or a political incentive. Publishers are
problem of an intuitive, unambiguous, and not loath to use exaggerated or misleading claims and
intelligible label presentation. For this pur- promises in teasers or headlines in order to catch read-
pose we (1) categorize the originally proposed ers’ attention (clickbaiting), making it hard to assess
information nutrition dimensions and (2) in- the (trust-) worthiness of an article ahead of reading.
terpret them in terms of well-known physical To improve this situation, the authors of [FGG+ 17]
quantities from which we belief that they are propose a so-called “information nutrition label” for
intuitively understandable for the general pub- online news. Like its food counterpart, the label is sup-
lic. To give an impression of our ideas, a visual posed to help people making more informed decisions
representation as well as the results of a pre- upon which news items to consume.
liminary crowd-sourcing study are presented. Starting from a set of nine information nutrition
dimensions that have been proposed in the original
1 Introduction work (see Section 2), we now further shape these ideas
The World Wide Web is a great source for news. How- towards fewer categories as well as an intuitively un-
ever, relying on online news does not come without derstandable representation of the underlying, often
difficulties both for the individual and for a society as a complex text analysis results (see Section 3). The pro-
whole [BMA15]. With the web’s sheer endless stream of posed label is based on a categorization of the nine in-
news on virtually any topic, readers get easily trapped formation nutrition dimensions into the five categories
into filter bubbles and may become disconnected from I Effort, II Kairos, III Logos, IV Pathos, and V Ethos.
important public discourses. Social networks stimulate The interpretation of these categories shall be simplified
the formation of echo chambers where groups of like- if associating them with well-known quantities from
minded people share hyperpartisan news while being physics (or finance in the case of V); Figure 1 shows
a possible implementation of the idea. I.e., a text is
Copyright © 2018 for the individual papers by the papers’ au- first analyzed regarding the nine information nutrition
thors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. dimensions whose resulting values are then combined
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. and rescaled to match the interpretation of the five
In: D. Albakour, D. Corney, J. Gonzalo, M. Martinez, B. Poblete, categories. In this regard, the value ranges that are
A. Vlachos (eds.): Proceedings of the NewsIR’18 Workshop
at ECIR, Grenoble, France, 26-March-2018, published at
employed for the proposed categories were determined
http://ceur-ws.org with a small crowdsourcing study (see Section 4).
Table 1: Categorization of the information nutrition dimensions (Column 1) into five categories (Column 2). Column 3
and 4 show the related physical/financial quantities and the proposed value ranges respectively. Column 5 states prototypical
user questions that the respective category addresses.
Dimension Category Quantity Range Addressed User Question
Readability I Effort Time 0 - 120 min Does time allow the reading?
Technicality
Verbosity*
Topicality II Kairos Temperature 0 - 100 °C Do others care?
Virality
Factuality III Logos Transparency 0 - 100 % How professional is the writing?
Verifiability*
Emotion IV Pathos Sound pressure 0 - 120 dB Is the article subjective?
Opinion
Controversy
Authority V Ethos Credit rating class A+. . . D How reliable is the source?
Credibility
Trust
2 Related Work and the virality of an article both represent temporal
and sociological phenomenons, and both may be used
The idea of computing an information nutrition label
to answer a question like “How much do others care
is an outcome of the Dagstuhl Seminar “User Gener-
about the article?”. Because of correlations like these,
ated Content in Social Media”, held in July 20171 , and
we presume that the nutrition dimensions can be sub-
has recently been published as a SIGIR Forum arti-
sumed into categories without a significant pragmatic
cle [FGG+ 17]. In their proposal, the authors suggest
loss of information.
nine dimensions as attributes for the information nutri-
In the second column of Table 1, our proposal for
tion label, with one dimension, “authority / credibility
such a categorization of the altogether 13 dimensions
/ trust”, actually comprising three dimensions into one.
into five groups is shown. The labels for the categories
Table 1 lists these dimensions in the left column; for a
II . . . V have been chosen in accordance to Aristotle’s
detailed description as well as for a related discussion
modes of persuasion [AK07], including the less well
we refer to the SIGIR forum article. Note that Table 1
known concept of “kairos”, which stands for the “right,
introduces two additional information nutrition dimen-
critical, or opportune moment”.2 Column 3 shows our
sions, namely “verbosity” and “verifiability”, which we
proposal for a category interpretation in physical terms
see as complementary to the originally proposed ones.
(financial in case of V), along with sensible value ranges
While “verbosity” refers to the length of an article,
in Column 4. In Column 5, a prototypical user question
“verifiability” refers to the extent to which an article
which is addressed by the respective category is stated.
provides pointers to resources that help to verify claims
In the following, each category is discussed in detail.
made [HVER15].
Category I, effort, groups all dimensions that affect
We presume that a label that displays the nine orig-
the time a reader has to allot to comprehend an article.
inal dimensions (along with their respective statistical
Besides verbosity, which has been used already by
measurement units) will receive attention mainly from
media websites to provide an estimated article reading
experts. In order to open the results of an intricate
time (e.g. by Medium3 ), the dimensions readability and
document analysis to the general public (cf. the mo-
technicality fall into this category. To express effort,
tivation for a traffic light system to simplify the food
we consider time in minutes as an intuitive choice. The
nutrition label [foo12]), we ask the question whether a
effort category allows readers to check whether they
simpler, yet equally informative and hence preferable
have enough time to read an article and to identify
label can be derived by merging those dimensions that
articles of a specific depth.
make pragmatically similar statements.
Category II, kairos, groups all dimensions that per-
tain to the trendiness, momentum, or hotness of an
3 Categorizing Information Dimensions
article or a topic, i.e., topicality and virality. As an
When studying the original nutrition dimensions it be- existing attempt to provide this category, the velocity
comes apparent that some of them, like topicality and graph [Pet13] on the media website Mashable4 can be
virality, or emotion, opinion, and controversy, are simi- 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos\#In_classical_rhetoric
lar from a pragmatic point of view. E.g., the topicality 3 https://medium.com
1 http://www.dagstuhl.de/17301 4 https://mashable.com
counted. As a quantity to express kairos, we consider
the temperature in the range of 0 − 100°C as intuitive. 1.0
The kairos category can bring articles to readers’ atten-
tions which would be “out of their bubble” otherwise. 0.5
Category III, logos, groups all dimensions that cap-
0.0
ture how well an author supports her claims with evi-
dence, i.e., factuality and verifiability. As a quantity
Effort Kairos Logos Pathos Ethos
to express logos, we consider transparency in the range
from 0 - 100% as intuitive. The logos category can help Figure 2: Violin plot for the annotations made by 42 Ama-
readers to assess the journalistic quality of an article zon Mechanical Turk workers for a news article from bre-
up front. itbart.com. The value range of all nutrition categories on
Category IV, pathos, groups all dimensions that are the y-axis are scaled to the interval [0, 1].
related to subjectivity and discrepancies, i.e., emotion,
position in the value range are depicted. To make the
opinion, and controversy. As a quantity to express
values in the depicted label more sensible, we asked
pathos, we consider volume, measured as sound pres-
a crowd of 42 workers to read and then annotate the
sure, as intuitive. The pathos category can help readers
news article exemplified in the SIGIR forum article
creating awareness that communities sharing alterna-
in the light of our categories.6 As final value for the
tive arguments or opinions likely exist.
label we took the mean of all 42 annotations. For
Category V, ethos, finally groups all dimensions
the sake of completeness, a violin plot showing the
related to the credibility of an author or publisher,
distribution of all annotations is shown in Figure 2.
i.e., authority, credibility, and trust. As a quantity to
The violin plot indicates that the above article takes
express ethos, we consider credit ratings in the range
little effort to comprehend and, it is obviously not very
from A+ to D, as used in finance,5 as an adequate
hot anymore (kairos). In terms of transparency and
choice. The ethos category can help readers assessing
sound pressure (logos and pathos), no clear consensus
the risk of becoming misinformed or, alternatively, the
is reached, while the publisher is clearly not top rated
potential of learning about non-mainstream viewpoints.
in terms of credibility (ethos).
For future work, we consider to present a computa-
4 Discussion tional model for the information nutrition label and
We see three advantages when using the proposed cate- to further investigate the correlation of its constituent
gories as attributes for the envisaged information nutri- parts with human intuition.
tion label instead of the original dimensions. First, the
reduced number of attributes makes the label both eas- References
ier to present and easier to digest in practical settings. [AK07] Aristotle and G.A. Kennedy. On Rhetoric: A
Second, by resorting to well-known quantities for the Theory of Civic Discourse. Oxford Press, 2007.
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without the need of detailed instructions. Third, the to ideologically diverse news and opinion on
chosen quantities allow for the design of a non-textual facebook. Science, 348(6239):1130–1132, 2015.
visualization of the nutrition label. On the other hand, [FGG+ 17] N. Fuhr, A. Giachanou, G. Grefenstette, I.
the potential concerns should not be overlooked: first, Gurevych, A. Hanselowski, K. Jarvelin, R. Jones, Y.
Liu, J. Mothe, W. Nejdl, I. Peters, and B. Stein. An
the categorization may be not as lossless as anticipated, Information Nutritional Label for Online
such that the five categories convey much less helpful Documents. SIGIR Forum, 51(3):44–66, 2017.
information than do the original dimensions. Second, [foo12] foodwatch. Research supports traffic light colours.
the quantities (or their visualizations) may lead to false https://www.foodwatch.org/more-information/
intuitions about the document they belong to. research-supports-traffic-light-colours/,
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As a very first step towards clarifying some of these
[HVER15] R. H. Harder, A. J. Velasco, M. S. Evans, and D. N.
concerns, we have designed a mainly non-textual repre-
Rockmore. Measuring verifiability in online
sentation for our label (see Figure 1), which allows for information. CoRR, abs/1509.05631, 2015.
a visual comparison with the tabular label presented in [Pet13] Robyn Peterson. Mashable launches google glass
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Accessed: 2018-03-17.
latter, both the absolute value as well as its relative
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_credit_rating\#Credit_ 6 http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/07/25/trumps-
rating_tiers attack-on-sessions-over-clinton-prosecution-highlights-his-
own-weak-stance/