Investigations into Trust for Collaborative Information Repositories: A Wikipedia Case Study Deborah L. McGuinnessDeborah L. McGuinness, Co-Director Knowledge Systems, Artificial Intelligence Lab, Stanford University Joint work with: Honglei Zeng, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Li Ding, Dhyanesh Narayanan, and Mayukh Bhaowal

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Big Picture  Research theme Make question answering systems more operational to users (agents/humans) by providing explanations for answers…  In many settings, explanations require some notion of trust in information and/or sources

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Trust is a Critical Emerging Component in Social Collaborative Information Spaces  Goal: Allow users to access, view, and analyze information informed by trust ratings. This enables users (and agents) to: Assess the trustworthiness of documents that are collaboratively created and updated Monitor the changes in trustworthiness of dynamic documents and provide timely notifications of possible malicious content modification Identify trustworthy information with visualization tools Access shareable trust information among heterogeneous systems Enable new design paradigms for Wikis with built-in trust components – e.g., target text analytic tools at more trustworthy documents or document fragments within a larger resource such as Wikipedia

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Some Issues Relevant to Collaborative Information Repositories/Wikis and Trust  Revisions: a key characteristic of Wikis Some social collaborative spaces, such as Wikis allow (and sometimes promote) updates to posts from others. Note that this differs from traditional bulletin boards, archived mailing lists, etc. that only support revision by way of follow-up posts  Rating-based systems Some web systems support and encourage explicit ratings of contributors and contributions Wikis have no explicit trust encoding support Simple rating schemes may not work (e.g. an article rated trustworthy may not still be trustworthy if modified)  We are exploring computational approaches to trust exploiting prominent Wiki features including: Citation-based trust approach (Wiki articles are interlinked via citations/hyperlinks) Revision-history based trust approach

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Terms  Concepts Article Version (of an article) Fragment Author  Relations An article may have multiple versions, each of which reflects the modification made by an author on a previous version A version can be split into multiple fragments, each of which is entirely contributed by a single author Article Version Fragment Author hasFragment:[1,p] hasVersion:[1,n] hasAuthor:[1,m] hasAuthor:[1,1]

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Citation-based Trust  Derive trust based on the citation relationships among articles For example, a well-cited article may be more trustworthy than an article that has no citations  In the same family as the well known (Google) PageRank.

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Link-ratio Algorithm  Link-ratio of an article (i.e., the page with title x): the ratio between the number of citation occurrences of the encyclopedia term x and the number of total occurrences of x (citations and non-citations). For example, “Seattle” appears 3855 times in Wikipedia, 1408 of which are citations (other mentions are not hot). The link-ratio value of “Seattle” is 1408/3855 =  Generally speaking*, the higher the link-ratio value of an article is, the more trustworthy an article is.  Issue: there may be no incentive to link to an encyclopedia entry (e.g. the “love” article vs. the “Gauss's law” article)

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Revision History-based Trust (an example of the “natural number” article in Wikipedia)  When (an anonymous author) inserted new content into the “natural number” page, originated by Trovatore, there could be an assumption of implicit trust in the original document fragment(s). Trovatore isAuthorOf Content Insertion v0: Oct 7, 2005v1: Dec 1, 2005 Natural number can mean either a positive integer (1, 2, 3,...) or a non-negative integer (0, 1, 2, 3, …) The former definition is generally used in number theory, while the latter is preferred in set theory.

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Deriving Trust from Revision History  Revision Operations (insertion, deletion, modification) implies trust. trustworthiness of the revised article depends on the trustworthiness of the previous version, the author of the last revision, and the amount of text involved in the last revision.  Revision history is widely available in cooperative information systems: Collaborative Software Development (CVS) Cooperative Document Authoring (Wikipedia)

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness A formulation of Revision Trust  (Assumption) The trustworthiness of a new article fragment is (only) dependent on its author.  (Assumption) the trustworthy content of a revised fragment f ’ is the trustworthy content of the previous fragment f minus the trustworthy content that the author a removed from f (e.g., a fragment f could be more trustworthy if the deletion made by a has removed inaccuracies in f) t f, t f ’, t a are trust values of f, f ’ and a respectively; |f|, |f ’| and |D| are the sizes of f, f ’ and D (D is the deleted text).

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Inference Web and PML  Inference Web is an infrastructure for providing explanations of results from web applications. It provides tools such as browsers, abstractors, checkers, summarizers, combiners to manipulate and present justifications.  PML is the interlingua representation language for Inference Web. Proof markup language (PML) is a representation language designed to be able to encode information agents may need in order to evaluate results – including where information came from and how it was manipulated.  PML has an OWL encoding (and XML serialization)  PML can be (and has been used) to represent justification of information manipulation steps done by theorem provers (e.g., JTP, SNARK), text analytic tools (e.g., UIMA), task processors (e.g., SPARK), rule engines/systems (e.g., CWM, Cybercop), etc.  The main components concern inference representation and provenance issues such as author, source, etc.  Our current work expands PML to include representation primitives for trust.

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness fragment A Sample PML encoding fragment trust author trust

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Proof Markup Language: Node Sets and Inference Steps iw:hasConclusion: Direct Assertion (DA) iw:NodeSet iw:isConsequenceOf iw:InferenceStep iw:hasLanguage:en iw:hasRule: iw:hasSourceUsage: Conclusion: In mathematics, a natural number is either a positive integer (1, 2, 3, 4,...) or a non-negative integer (0, 1, 2, 3, 4,...). Encoding this conclusion in PML: articleID, author, timestamp In mathematics, a natural number is either a positive integer (1, 2, 3, 4,...) or a non-negative integer (0, 1, 2, 3, 4,...).

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Proof Markup Language: Aggregated Trust Relation Wikipedia iw: AggregatedTrustRelation iw:hasTrustedParty: iw:hasTrustingParty: iw:hasTrustValue: A trivial conclusion: In mathematics, a natural number is either a positive integer (1, 2, 3, 4,...) or a non-negative integer (0, 1, 2, 3, 4,...). Encoding trust conclusion in PML: Wikipedia author

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Application: Trust View in Wikipedia Wikipedia Database article revision author Article D (version, author) + Fragmentation Service Wikipedia DB processor Article D (fragment, version)+ (fragment, author)+ Trust Valuation Service Trust Rendering Service PML for D Article D (fragment, trust)+ (version, trust)+ (author, trust)+ HTML for D User Click “trust” tab Wikipedia User Click “pml” tab Wikipedia view input output input output Article D (version, author)+ citations, …

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Wikipedia Article without Trust View

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Wikipedia Article with Citation Trust View Multiple Trust View Tab Fragments are colored per their trust values computed from Citation Trust (default mode).

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Wikipedia Article with Revision Trust View Fragments are colored per their trust values computed from Revision Trust.

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Conclusion  Inference Web and PML can be used to support encoding and presentation of trust related to information in social collaborative information repositories such as Wikis.  We have designed and implemented a simple trust representation that extends PML and included support for the extension in our IW tools.  More sophisticated trust modeling and trust processing is expected to be required.  We are investigating Models of trust Trust aggregation from multiple sources and multiple algorithms Refinements and usage of revision-based trust Additional trust approaches and their combination New applications utilizing (sharable) trust information More info: Inference Web: iw.stanford.edu Simple examples of PML markup with wiki demo: foto.stanford.edu/mediawiki /index.php/Main_Page

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Extra

May 22, 2006MTW - McGuinness Abstract PML wiki:ArticleVersion iw:NodeSet In mathematics, a natural number is either a positive integer … iw:Person Oleg Alexandrov iw:AggregatedTrust fragment trust is iw:AggregatedTrust author trust is iw:NodeSet (fragment n) … wiki:hasFragmentList iw:Person (author m) iw:hasSource iw:Organization Wikipedia iw:hasTrustingParty iw:hasTrustedParty Note: Green nodes are in IW registry