It would still be helpful to have automatic fact-checking of simple statements. Consider this Hacker News thread—two people are arguing about crime rates in the UK and USA. Someone says “The UK is a much more violent society than the US” and they argue about that, neither providing citations. That might be simple enough that natural language processing could parse it and check it against various interpretations of it. For example, one could imagine a bot that notices when people are arguing over something like that (whether on the internet or in a national election. It would provide useful relevant statistics, like the total violent crime rates in each country, or the murder rate, or whatever it thinks is relevant. If it were an ongoing software project, the programmers could notice when it’s upvoted and downvoted, and improve it.
It would still be helpful to have automatic fact-checking of simple statements. Consider this Hacker News thread—two people are arguing about crime rates in the UK and USA. Someone says “The UK is a much more violent society than the US” and they argue about that, neither providing citations. That might be simple enough that natural language processing could parse it and check it against various interpretations of it. For example, one could imagine a bot that notices when people are arguing over something like that (whether on the internet or in a national election. It would provide useful relevant statistics, like the total violent crime rates in each country, or the murder rate, or whatever it thinks is relevant. If it were an ongoing software project, the programmers could notice when it’s upvoted and downvoted, and improve it.
This is harder than it seems. The two countries use different methodologies to collect their crime statistics.
Yes, you’d want to use the International Crime Victims Survey. It’s the standard way to compare crime rates between countries.