IWTrust: Improving user trust in answers from the Web

Abstract

Question answering systems users may find answers without any supporting information insufficient for determining trust levels. Once those question answering systems begin to rely on source information that varies greatly in quality and depth, such as is typical in web settings, users may trust answers even less. We address this problem by augmenting answers with optional information about the sources that were used in the answer generation process. In addition, we introduce a trust infrastructure, IWTrust, which enables computations of trust values for answers from the Web. Users of IWTrust have access to sources used in answer computation along with trust values for those source, thus they are better able to judge answer trustworthiness. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.