About: “What if generative AI could help us understand people with opposing views better just by showing how they use common words and phrases differently? That’s the deceptively simple-sounding idea behind a new experiment from MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication (CCC).
It’s called the Bridging Dictionary (BD), a research prototype that’s still very much a work in progress – one we hope your feedback will help us improve.
The Bridging Dictionary identifies words and phrases that both reflect and contribute to sharply divergent views in our fractured public sphere. That’s the “dictionary” part. If that’s all it did, we could just call it the “Frictionary.” But the large language model (LLM) that undergirds the BD also suggests less polarized alternatives – hence “bridging.”
In this prototype, research scientist Doug Beeferman and a team at CCC led by Maya Detwiller and Dennis Jen used thousands of transcripts and opinion articles from foxnews.com and msnbc.com as proxies for the conversation on the right and the left. You’ll see the most polarized words and phrases when you sample the BD for yourself, but you can also plug any term of your choosing into the search box. (For a more complete explanation of the methodology behind the BD, see https://bridgingdictionary.org/info/ .)…(More)”.