Highlighting Weasel Sentences for Promoting Critical Information Seeking on the Web

Abstract

This paper proposes a system that highlights weasel sentences while browsing webpages. The term weasel sentence is defined in the context of this paper as a quotation with an unknown or unidentifiable source. Following this definition, the system automatically detects weasel sentences in browsed webpages. Then, we investigate how highlighting weasel sentences affects the search behaviors and decision making of the users searching for information on the web. An online user study yielded the following results: (1) Highlighting the weasel sentences encouraged participants to invest more time in web browsing and to view a larger number of webpages. (2) The effect of (1) was more significant when participants were familiar with the search topics. (3) Web browsing elicited less change in the confidence of the search answers when participants were familiar with the given topics. The findings provide insights into how users can avoid gathering misleading on the web.