The truth, according to Google

a reply to: dusty1

Your post illustrates why this concept is a disaster, and why that paper should be an embarrassment to Cornell University.

The whole project hinges on the Knowledge Vault Project, as you pointed out. For this "Veracity" figure to have any meaning the "facts" stored in the vault have to be true. How can a computer algorithm determine the truthfulness of a fact though?

Inference is an iterative process, since we believe a source is accurate if its facts are correct, and we believe the facts are correct if they are extracted from an accurate source

Well, that's uselessly recursive, isn't it?

Here's more info from another article.

Google's fact-checking bots build vast knowledge bank
by Hal Hodson - 20 August 2014 newscientist.com

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GOOGLE is building the largest store of knowledge in human history – and it's doing so without any human help. [ED: It's not encouraging that New Scientist would start an article on fact checking with an incorrect fact.]

Instead, Knowledge Vault autonomously gathers and merges information from across the web into a single base of facts about the world, and the people and objects in it.
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Knowledge Vault is a type of "knowledge base" – a system that stores information so that machines as well as people can read it. Where a database deals with numbers, a knowledge base deals with facts. When you type "Where was Madonna born" into Google, for example, the place given is pulled from Google's existing knowledge base.

This existing base, called Knowledge Graph, relies on crowdsourcing to expand its information. But the firm noticed that growth was stalling; humans could only take it so far.

So Google decided it needed to automate the process. It started building the Vault by using an algorithm to automatically pull in information from all over the web, using machine learning to turn the raw data into usable pieces of knowledge.

Knowledge Vault has pulled in 1.6 billion facts to date. Of these, 271 million are rated as "confident facts", to which Google's model ascribes a more than 90 per cent chance of being true. It does this by cross-referencing new facts with what it already knows. [ED: Well, that's pretty impressive. How does it already know anything though?]
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Google's Knowledge Graph is currently bigger than the Knowledge Vault, but it only includes manually integrated sources such as the CIA Factbook.[ED: Oh, well that's good then. I mean the CIA named it Factbook, right? So it's got to be true.]
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Tom Austin, a technology analyst at Gartner in Boston, says that the world's biggest technology companies are racing to build similar vaults. "Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and IBM are all building them, and they're tackling these enormous problems that we would never even have thought of trying 10 years ago," he says. [ED: Yes, but since they seem completely unaware of what a fact is, this doesn't fill me with joy.]
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Other agents will carry out the same process to watch over and guide our health, sorting through a knowledge base of medical symptoms to find correlations with data in each person's health records. IBM's Watson is already doing this for cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York. [ED: Good thing the Affordable Care Act will make those personal health records accessible then, I guess. Can you imagine using such a system to make health decisions? Doctors can't even agree on "simple" things like the role of cholesterol in heart disease, and they're thinking an algorithm is going to be able to sort the truth out for us? Stellar.]

"Behind the scenes, Google doesn't only have public data," says Suchanek. It can also pull in information from Gmail, Google+ and YouTube. "You and I are stored in the Knowledge Vault in the same way as Elvis Presley," Suchanek says.

Google disputes this, however. In an email to New Scientist, a company spokesperson said, "The Knowledge Vault does not deal with personal information."[ED: Um, Google's comment doesn't refute Suchanek's entire comment. It might be true that they don't store personal information in the knowledge vault that associates data with individ...wait, didn't they use an example earlier regarding where Madonna was born? Also, Google never denied that they can pull in information from Gmail, Google+, and Youtube.]
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Richer vaults of knowledge will also change the way we study human society "This is the most visionary thing," says Suchanek. "The Knowledge Vault can model history and society."
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www.newscientist.com... . Less than 50% copied. Emphasis added. Edited for readability. Editorial comments added in [ ] brackets.

I'm sure this system will work for a vast amount of undisputed data. When it comes to contested facts, however, it will come down to what someone at Google decides the truth is. As we see in the Obama example, they didn't even question whether they knew for a fact where Obama was born.

I'm sure they will eventually implement something along these lines, and you can already see, Orly Tate won't be showing up in the first page of search results about Obama's birthplace. To me, that's no great loss, but then again, I don't know sh#t.

But Google does.

So don't worry, Virginia. There is a Santa Claus, and he lives at Google, and soon will be delivering sleighs filled with GoogleFacts(tm) direct to your computer.

Where's my martini? No, I mean my next martini. Just keep lining them up. This post was long, and I have catching up to do.

aHEMagain

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