Truthteller: geautomatiseerd feiten checken met de Washington Post

The beta prototype that the Post launched on Tuesday isn’t quite there yet — it is only capable of checking facts related to taxation law and proposed changes to those laws, information that has been hand-fed to the system. But eventually, the newspaper says that the application should be able to do this about a wide range of topics by checking the Post‘s database in real time The Post‘s executive producer for digital news, Cory Haik, explains that the application turns speech from a video into text and then checks statements from that text version with an algorithm (a modified Rabin-Karp using Levenshtein distance). While watching a video of House Speaker John Boehner, for example, when he says that raising the top tax rate would “kill 700,000 jobs,” the application pops up a large warning in red, saying: “False.”