From Nuisance to News Sense: Augmenting the News with Cross-Document
  Evidence and Context
Jeremiah Milbauer Ziqi Ding Zhijin Wu Tongshuang Wu
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.