Truthfulness Analysis of Fact Statements Using the Web

Web users increasingly treat the Web as a very large knowledge base and use it to acquire all kinds of knowledge. In this article, we introduce a method that leverages the information on the Web to determine the truthfulness of any statement that attempts to state a fact. This method accomplishes the goal by checking whether there is an alternative statement that is more likely to be truthful. As a result, this method can find an alternative truthful statement when the given statement is not truthful. Our experimental results show that the proposed method is effective. In this article, we also provide some insights on how to extend this work and how to leverage this technique to estimate the trustworthiness of web pages and websites.