BASE: a Bias-Aware news Search Engine for improving user awareness [Prototype]

The BASE prototype aims to improve user awareness of biases in search engine results. It utilises existing resources and NLP tools to identify biases in news articles. It incorporates bias visualisation features to inform users of biases in each news article and at the search results level. It also incorporates results reranking features to allow users to retrieve different sets of results based on their search preferences. Preliminary evaluation results suggest the prototype achieves a positive usability score (64.3 out of 100) and has a potential for increasing user awareness of biases, with the reranking features rated more useful than the bias visualisation features.This work has been partly supported by the project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 739578 (RISE – Call: H2020-WIDESPREAD-01-2016-2017-TeamingPhase2) and the Republic of Cyprus through the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy