Providing Web Credibility Assessment Support

Abstract

Presence of information from multiple sources on the internet requires evaluating the credibility of the information, before its utilization. Researchers have suggested that internet users experience difficulty in accessing necessary information and do not pay enough attention to its credibility. We present here the design and implementation of an automated Web Credibility Assessment Support Tool (WebCAST) that considers multiple factors (type of website, popularity, sentiment, date of last update, reputation and review based on users' ratings reflecting personal experience) for assessing the credibility of information and returns a summary indication of the credibility of a website. We use Potentially All Pairwise RanKings of all possible Alternatives (PAPRIKA) method of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to give weights to the scale values on each factor, representing the relative importance of the attributes. An empirical evaluation of the tool was conducted by computing the correlation between the tool-generated credibility scores and that of human judges. The correlation was found to be 0.89, thus verifying the validity of the tool. In the future the proposed tool can be made useful to students in their learning process of credibility assessment.