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Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

344 points by chiefofgxbxl 5y ago

gault8121 5y ago
This is an interesting tool! It would be cool if you could take say 20 articles from Gothamist, Streetsblog, NYT, NY Post, Pix11, etc. and see how they all ranked in this system. That could be a really interesting blog post. -- Which tools are you using for these NLP judgments? Are you using SpaCy at all? Are there any models you've built here, or is this all rules on top of an NLP model? I'm working on NLP models for education, and we use SpaCy a ton. I'm peter@quill.org if you want to learn more about how we're using this.
- chiefofgxbxl 5y ago
  Thanks! Comparison between news outlets is on the radar, once I improve the tool based on feedback from this Show HN. My backend uses spaCy (NER/NLP), textacy [1] for extracting subject-verb-object triples, and coreferee [2] for coreference resolution. I did build a custom spaCy model for which I manually annotated over 700 crash-related news articles in Label Studio [3]. This custom model identifies counterfactuals, framing (e.g. thematic elements), and what's called CARLIKE, because vehicles can be referred to in so many ways (year-make-model, year-model, color model, generic terms like pickup/sedan/truck, nicknames like Chevy instead of Chevrolet, etc. Coreference resolution was probably my favorite part of the NLP analyzer. For example: "A woman was injured after being struck by a vehicle. She was walking on Washington Street when the incident took place." Now we can identify "woman" as a pedestrian because "she" was walking. Implementing that coreference resolution felt magical, because now the tool can pick up so many more issues that it couldn't before when it only looked at individual sentences. I'll be writing an in-depth article about my implementation and journey, and I'll be sure to shoot you an email to chat with you some time. [1] https://github.com/chartbeat-labs/textacy https://github.com/chartbeat-labs/textacy [2] https://github.com/msg-systems/coreferee https://github.com/msg-systems/coreferee [3] https://labelstud.io/ https://labelstud.io/
  - gault8121 5y ago
    Awesome, thanks for following up! We also use coreference resolution - we specifically found Allen NLP's coreference to be the most accurate in an analysis of a few different offerings: http://docs.allennlp.org/v0.9.0/api/allennlp.models.coreference_resolution.html http://docs.allennlp.org/v0.9.0/api/allennlp.models.corefere...
chiefofgxbxl 5y ago
Hi HN, I built "Vision Zero Reporting" (https://visionzeroreporting.com https://visionzeroreporting.com), a tool to detect editorial anti-patterns in local news coverage of car crashes. Maybe you've noticed that local news articles about car crashes, especially those that involve "vulnerable road users" (VRU) such as bicyclists and pedestrians, tend to employ language that seems to blame the victim or only discuss the incident as an isolated event, rather than in context that crashes are preventable and are caused by specific reasons. This tool is meant to help news publishers check their articles and learn the anti-patterns to avoid. Here's a brief explanation of the problems my tool checks for: 1. Focus - Readers find the focus/subject of the sentence more in control of the situation, and hence more blameworthy (e.g. "A pedestrian was struck by a driver" VS "A driver struck a pedestrian"). 2. Agency - Some sentences lack an agent altogether, which places more blame on the recipient (e.g. "A bicyclist was hit." VS "A bicyclist was hit by a driver.") 3. Object-based reference - Pedestrians and bicyclists are almost always referred to using people-based language, but drivers are referred to using object-based language 81% of the time [1] (e.g. "The vehicle fled the scene" VS "The driver fled the scene"). This language personifies and gives agency to vehicles rather than their drivers. 4. Accident - Accident is the most-used term in articles to describe the incident (47%). This term is being phased out by some news agencies because the word implies a sense of inevitability or that it happened purely by chance, when we know why car crashes happen and can take preventative action. 5. Framing - (still in beta) Articles employ an "episodic" frame, meaning they describe crashes as isolated incidents. Only 6% (!) of articles use "thematic" framing [1], meaning they contextualize the event by discussing road design, number of recent crashes in the area, quote experts, educate readers about road safety initiatives, etc. 6. Counterfactual - (still in beta) Counterfactuals are true statements, but imply the outcome could have been changed had the victim acted differently. While reporters may see these statements as sticking-to-the-facts, we've discovered in 700+ manually-annotated articles that counterfactuals almost always shift blame toward the victim (A bicyclist was struck; he wasn't wearing a helmet. It was dark outside, the biker wasn't wearing reflective clothing, and the driver told police he didn't see the bicyclist until it was too late.) Notice that all of these statements may be true, but goes hand-in-hand with the Framing issue discussed above: the bicyclist was hit, but is that because there is no protected bike lane? It was dark outside, but is road visibility a municipal obligation? I'm looking for constructive feedback to make this tool better! My work is based primarily on the following research papers (and I've already shown the tool to the authors - they loved it!): [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330975590_Editorial_Patterns_in_Bicyclist_and_Pedestrian_Crash_Reporting https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330975590_Editorial... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337279845_Does_news_coverage_of_traffic_crashes_affect_perceived_blame_and_preferred_solutions_Evidence_from_an_experiment https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337279845_Does_news...
04rob 5y ago
Is the source code available? It would be interesting to apply this to reporting on other topics. As far as suggestions, it would be great to see an explanation of each problem when hovering over it in the text. Also, the colors for the "Object", "Counterfactuals", and "Accident" problems are difficult to distinguish for color-deficient individuals.
UncleEntity 5y ago
> "The vehicle fled the scene" VS "The driver fled the scene" It is quite common for the driver to flee the scene while leaving behind the disabled vehicle. …one of my old coworker’s vehicle was involved in an accident with a pedestrian who ran full speed in front of her while it was dark outside and the vehicle was traveling at the legal speed limit. Said vehicle was unable to stop in time which resulted in the speeding pedestrian striking the vehicle.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Are you sure it wasn’t that the road moved under the pedestrian’s feet locating her in front of the vehicle comoving with the road in one direction and along it in another? I think you haven’t presented evidence.
ipsin 5y ago
It would be nice if the color-coded key ("Object", etc.) linked to the detailed sections below. When I first saw "Object" in the summary, I didn't know what it meant.
ape4 5y ago
Instead of just "a woman was killed" it could mention the devastating effect to her family.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  How does the program know how the family reacted?
  - ape4 5y ago
    The program just needs to flag if this info is missing.
podiki 5y ago
Very nice, I like it! And as a frequent cyclist and writing instructor, really appreciate this kind of work on many levels. Good to see NLP towards social good like this.
PaulHoule 5y ago
I like it. I like that it tags segments of text as opposed to the document as a whole. Since it is confined to a domain and has a well-chosen problem it seems to be highly correct and thus useful.
mtlynch 5y ago
This is cool! I appreciate the effort here to make the roads safer for bicyclists and pedestrians, as I'd love to see more people prioritize this. The homepage confused me because the presentation of the two examples made me think that they were before/after at first. It took me ~30s to realize they were just two separate articles. I'd like to see a bad article juxtaposed with an improved version that someone created using your tool. I'm maybe used to tools like Grammarly, but when I clicked / hovered over the highlighted text, I was surprised to see nothing happen. I found it a little difficult to scroll back and forth between the highlighted text and the context where it appeared in the article. Having an explanation appear next to the cursor on mouse click/hover might resolve this. It would also be cool if the tool allowed me to import by URL (with some suggested real articles to show this is a problem in mainstream news sources) rather than require the user to copy/paste manually.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I think this is going to be a major application for "attempting" to identify "types" of biases. I'm being super cautious here because the term bias is painfully misunderstood in most circumstances and often misused as a cudgel rather than a context. But I think it could be educational to observe cultural/social/political trends by distilling content this way.
paulgb 5y ago
I like it! I assume the red/yellow/green are roughly bad/warning/good, but what do the blue highlights mean? I agree with another comment that a tooltip to say which of the categories you listed a given span falls into.
rootusrootus 5y ago
I gather that the intent is not to make the reporting more neutral or accurate, but to change the framing in a direction that vision zero finds more appealing. E.g. in the first article we should view the woman as a vulnerable road user, bearing no responsibility for being struck by a vehicle even though video evidence shows that she fell into the street.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Yes, I do not think you bear responsibility if you collapse and someone strikes you with their car and then flees the scene.
  - JackFr 5y ago
    Don’t be obtuse. A person collapses into the street and is struck by oncoming traffic - no one is to blame. It is an accident.
    - dfxm12 5y ago
      Who's being obtuse? It looks like neither you nor the parent comment assign blame to the woman that the driver struck. From here, it looks like you are in agreement. The parent comment didn't even say one way or another if the driver who struck the woman should get any blame...
    - ecshafer 5y ago
      If someone collapses into the street, the driver should be able to stop in time, unless they are going to fast. Who I can think to blame here: * The auto manufacturer for not having sensors to detect this. * The city for making car dependent areas * The city for making roads that have cars drive so fast by pedestrians, that the pedestrian can die if hit * The driver for not driving more reasonably * The city for not having a barrier between the sidewalk and the road, China has these in a lot of areas, a curb with a hedge between the side walks and roads, or a fence. The pedestrian who collapses is the last to blame in my view.
dymk 5y ago
This is neat, but something bugs me about the framing of the intended goal versus how you propose to get there. If the intent is to raise public awareness and to put pressure on leadership to make roads generally safer, why do almost all the corrections follow a pattern of shifting blame from the individual pedestrian onto the individual driver? Many of the suggested fixes are just their own form of counterfactual - they're facts, sure, but they don't contribute to public understanding of _why_ the crash happened. The examples of removing counterfactual outright and including thematic framing (focusing on road conditions, frequency of crashes, and aggregate statistics that tell the story of how often crashes occur) seem to be the best set of suggestions for correcting public perception on road safety. Not making sure the public knows this _one specific driver_ hit a pedestrian, rather than their car.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Couldn’t part of the larger “why?” be that individual drivers are not sufficiently subject to liability for causing accidents with pedestrians, cyclists, etc.? If it is the case that it’s almost impossible for a driver to get in any trouble for causing such an accident (except in the most egregious cases of reckless driving) then it doesn’t make sense to avoid talking about that.
  - ryantgtg 5y ago
    I can see value in not consistently talking about “btw killing someone with your car is basically a get out of jail card”. Most people probably don’t realize this. (Or am I misunderstanding your last sentence?)
- advisedwang 5y ago
  I agree, the best outcome would be if news stories said things like * "5 crashes have happened at this intersection so far this year" * "The speed limit at the crash site was 35, above the standard arterial speed limit of 25" * "The road at the bend had sharrow markings, which cycling advocates say are ineffective and inferior to marked or protected bike lines."
- bluGill 5y ago
briandear 5y ago
This could also be used for gun crime reporting as well.
- aerostable_slug 5y ago
  That would be politically infeasible. The overwhelming narrative would be "young black male gang member kills other young black male gang member, destroying the hopes and dreams Victim A's grandmother had for him", and that already doesn't get widely reported. https://heyjackass.com/ https://heyjackass.com/
natch 5y ago
To better understand what their intent is, I recommend clicking on the little hamburger menu at the top and reading the “Issues” page listed there.
natch 5y ago
As feedback, speaking of contextualizing things, it would help if you would contextualize your colored highlighting by bringing some of the explanations of issues onto the page itself where the content is marked up. Or have links (maybe have the highlighted words be links) going to a writeup telling why those words got that color.
jasonhansel 5y ago
Worth noting the history behind this issue of biased reporting: > In the late 1920s and ’30s, a consortium of automobile manufacturers, insurers, and fuel companies known as the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce funded a wire service that provided free reporting on crashes to short-staffed Depression-era newspapers. Reporters could send in a few basic details about a local collision, and the wire service would craft a narrative that exonerated the driver, blamed any pedestrians who were involved, and — crucially — transformed virtually every “crash” into an understandable or even inevitable “accident.” Newspapers around the country published the industry-approved stories, often without edits. Source: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/03/05/streetsblog-101-how-journalists-help-build-car-culture/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/03/05/streetsblog-101-how-j...
- deleted 5y ago
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fermigier 5y ago
I like the general idea, and the use of NLP to implement it. But I am dubious about some of the principles behind it. - For example, I find it inaccurate to say "the driver hit the pedestrian", which to me suggests a collision between two people, not between a person and a vehicle. (Of course this does not apply to a phrase like "the vehicle fled the scene" - it is clear that it was the driver who fled the scene). While it's obvious the driver is responsible for the trajectory of their vehicle, it's also clear that the injuries and deaths are caused by the fact that one of the elements involved in the collusion is a 1+ ton piece of steel, and the other one a 70kg human being. - Regarding the term "accident", I see in the Merriam-Webster that it is defined in this context as: "an unfortunate event resulting in particular from negligence or ignorance". It seems to me that this definition does not exonerate the driver from responsibility (lack of vigilance or competence).
- FabHK 5y ago
  > Regarding the term "accident" I think in aviation circles the word "accident" is disliked because it implies a certain inevitability and tends to terminate the search for further underlying causes. If it's a crash, then we find out why, and if it happened because there was some debris on the runway or a certain switch in the cockpit was in the wrong position, then we need to find out how that could have happened and what to undertake to make sure it doesn't happen again.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  I find "the vehicle fled the scene" as a useful phrase that's used to distinguish this situation from the very different "the driver fled the scene" which is commonly used in the (not that rare) cases where the driver abandons the wrecked car after an accident, in some cases to hide that they were intoxicated.
  - fn-mote 5y ago
    I disagree. Shifting the agency to the driver is important enough to my that I recommend writers use "the driver fled the scene on foot" if that's what happened. (This particular phrase is actually used.) It seems obvious that "the vehicle" is not doing the fleeing, so even if this is standard phrasing it should be revised.
xraystyle 5y ago
> Show HN: Ensure all car crash articles are biased against the driver and vehicles generally using NLP Seems like a better title for this. In the analysis of the first article, under the "recommendations" about counterfactuals, it's literally telling you to remove relevant context about the incident, to ensure the readers can't possibly come to the "wrong" conclusion about who's responsible. Distrust of news media is at an all-time high[1] and if people can't see how this sort of thing contributes, I really don't know what to say at this point. 1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrustful-mass-media.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrus...
kazinator 5y ago
I don't think that "the cyclist was not wearing a helmet" or "impairment was not an issue" are examples of counterfactuals; the authors should crack open a dictionary look up what that word means in general use, and additionally how it is used in philosophy and science. If you have word from the police that the driver was not found to have any alcohol or if the cyclist wasn't wearing a helmet, those are simply facts, not counterfactuals. (An article about an accident should report all the hitherto known facts; then it can't be accused of having a bias with regard to cherry-picking the facts.) There is a problem with "alcohol doesn't appear to be a factor" in that it lacks conclusiveness. Appear to whom? For what reasons, and why aren't they sure? The driver was able to touch their nose with their eyes closed, is that it? I think a reasonable rule should be to cull any probabilistic statements, or statements with hedge words introducing uncertainty: remove all such statements from third parties, and under no circumstances invent new probabilistic statements in the process of editorializing. In fact, it's the use of the word accident that may have the counterfactual issue (and good point here). There is a supposition behind it which may be false. Maybe it wasn't an accident? You can't logically call a pedestrian hit an accident until other hypotheses have been ruled out, like the driver had a specific murder motive, or is crazy. It's also hard to call it an accident if the driver was blatantly reckless: acted contrary to the rules of the road which are intended to prevent such occurrences, and which the driver is legally obliged to follow as a matter of licensing. If a walking person falls into a fountain due to texting on their phone, it's difficult to swallow the word accident, since they were practically begging for something to happen by moving through an environment while choosing to block it out.
- deleted 5y ago
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- chiefofgxbxl 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. There seems to be some conflict with how to define "counterfactual". Merriam-Webster defines it as "contrary to fact" [1], so that comes down to a statement being either true or false. But the way I'm using it (and the research my work is based off) aligns more with the Cambridge dictionary usage: "thinking about what did not happen but could have happened, or relating to this kind of thinking" [2]. Further, Stanford Philosophy states, "Modal discourse concerns alternative ways things can be, e.g., what might be true, what isn’t true but could have been, what should be done. This entry focuses on counterfactual modality which concerns what is not, but could or would have been." [3] > If you have word from the police that the driver was not found to have any alcohol or if the cyclist wasn't wearing a helmet, those are simply facts, not counterfactuals. I do believe these are counterfactuals, consistent with definitions from [2] and [3]. For example, if a bicyclist is hit and killed and the news article states the fact he wasn't wearing a helmet, sometimes it feels like the article is insinuating that if the bicyclist had been wearing a helmet, he would have survived. Of course, we cannot know that without investigating how fast the driver was going, how heavy the colliding vehicle was, etc. Some of those crashes are simply unsurvivable. The article espouses a "what could have been" thought. Please feel free to disagree, but provide links so I can read more. > You can't logically call a pedestrian hit an accident until other hypotheses have been ruled out I agree, but it seems that journalists take a different view. They see "crash" as intentional (i.e. you used your vehicle to murder someone), and that's why they use the word "accident". The way I see it, accident implies the incident was unforeseeable and unpreventable. I also think "accident" requires a higher burden of proof: just like all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares, I think all accidents are crashes, but not all crashes are accidents. In the absence of a conclusive police investigation demonstrating complete unavoidability, the word accident should not be used. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/counterfactual https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/counterfactual [2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/counterfactual https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/counterf... [3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/counterfactuals/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/counterfactuals/
beaconstudios 5y ago
this seems to me like it's designed to shift the blame from unilaterally on the VRU (bad), to unilaterally on the driver (also bad). You pay lip service to systemic problems, but this is not a systemic approach to reducing crashes; it just implies that the driver is at fault, which is not always the case in these things. As another comment noted, reporters would do well to highlight the context around the crash if there's no clear fault (such as an intoxicated or negligent driver, or a pedestrian running into the road within minimum braking distance), such as lack of bike lanes, blind corners, etc that would apply pressure to authorities to make the roads safer. Not all crashes can be default-blamed on the driver.
- codezero 5y ago
  If a Cessna crashes into a car, is it safe to blame the Cessna and not the car, rather than treat it as a special case? I'm sure a car could swerve onto a runway mid-landing, but it would be the exception to the rule, right? When operating a car you should be expected to be in a heightened state of awareness and responsibility because of your capacity to cause damage, compared to a pedestrian. The bias in the current narrative (against pedestrians who have little autonomy vs a car) is so strongly on the wrong side that I don't think asking for a middle-ground approach is worth arguing. I can't tell you how many times I've read stuff like this: https://www.bikelaw.com/2021/10/waller-bike-crash/ https://www.bikelaw.com/2021/10/waller-bike-crash/
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    I think that's a false choice; rather than choosing between anti-VRU bias (as present) and anti-driver bias (as proposed), why not choose to report the specific facts of the incident at hand? Blaming one party all the time is stupid, because one party is not always at fault. Edit: Your cessna example makes no sense, as cars and planes do not generally share space. Should bikes and cars share space? No, but that's part of the systemic aspect of the problem.
    - codezero 5y ago
      I am arguing people and cars don't generally share space either. When a car hits a person, it's rare and I do think it should bias against the large, dangerous hardware, while also examining the facts. We have a century of bias-towards-cars coverage which permeates all society, police officers writing their reports are biased from what they've read and how they are trained, I don't think it's an over correction to default to assuming the larger, more regulated and dangerous side of any collision is by default assumed to be at fault, and for the other side to be the exception to the rule. I say this as a person who's driven a car for 25 years and never hit any people, and who has been hit by a car by a driver who wasn't paying attention multiple times. What's worse, is drivers are often angry at cyclists for even existing, rather than taking responsibility for being aware of their surroundings. The cessna example is a little over the top, but not totally out of line as a metaphor.
dash2 5y ago
I'm afraid I find this somewhere between creepy and ridiculous. On the ridiculous side: the idea that calling a car accident an "accident" is somehow wrong - as if, because I understand that what happened was an accident, I am somehow incapable of thinking "hey, maybe we need better road safety legislation". On the creepy side: the general approach which is, instead of making public arguments about why cars are bad, to manipulate language so as to push people to your side, using results from behavioural science. Of course, if you think the author is on the side of the angels, then this is great! But the techniques can be used by equally self-righteous people, with whom you may disagree. Treating people like sheep is gross. Don't do it.
- dml2135 5y ago
  The issue is that the term accident implies a lack of intension, while in most crash reporting we actually have no idea if the collision was intentional, negligent, or whatever. Using a term like crash or collision is actually much closer to the bare facts.
  - fermigier 5y ago
    As I have stated in another comment, according to Merriam-Webster, a (car) accident is "an unfortunate event resulting in particular from negligence or ignorance". It doesn't imply intention (in which case it would become a homicide, in the case the victim is deceased), but certainly implies responsibility from the driver.
- deleted 5y ago
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- ihaveajob 5y ago
  The problem with using "accident" as the default term is that it preempts any evidence-finding, implying that it was nobody's fault. If someone shoots their gun randomly and someone gets hurt by just being there, nobody will call it an "accident", but somehow if the weapon is a car, the driver gets the benefit of the doubt regardless of the facts.
chana_masala 5y ago
I hope you can look past the negative responses here. I think this is very well intentioned and well done. It would be nice to see more rationale on the website like what you've written here
markstos 5y ago
Here’s why the reframing matters: Accidents are “oops” that are to accepted as fact of life. The no reason to change the system. Accidents happen. Crashes are not accidents. They have a cause and the cause can addressed. Crashes can be prevented. So the reframing shifts from talking about a system we should accept how it is to one that can be improved.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  It would be inaccurate, unethical, and potentially libelous for any newspaper to construe the events of a potential criminal act (or any event, really) without doing any investigation to support that conclusion, and primarily in order to further an editorial agenda.
  - markstos 5y ago
    I've been employed as a newspaper editor and am familiar with libel laws and the ethics of journalism. What's been advocated for is accurate reporting, not conclusion-jumping. Currently there are headlines like this: "Car hits cyclist" Why is a victim a person but the actor is an inanimate object? They don't say "car hits bike". A more accurate headline would be "Car driver hits cyclist". The other way to improve reporting is to call a preventable crash what it is, a crash and not an "accident". More here: https://www.bicycling.com/news/a20049939/five-cyclist-blaming-headlines-and-how-to-reframe-them/ https://www.bicycling.com/news/a20049939/five-cyclist-blamin...
    - karaterobot 5y ago
      > Why is a victim a person but the actor is an inanimate object? To humanize the victim without ascribing blame, when blame is unknown. For the same reason you wouldn't have a headline that read "Alice killed Bob with her car": even though that may technically be true, it's needlessly critical. Needless from the perspective of an editorially neutral party, like a newspaper, but not from the perspective of an activist, like this website.
      - 5y ago
uDontKnowMe 5y ago
Thank you so much for this, it's great work!
gSdYMA 5y ago
Does anyone know who is behind that project? Who is developing it?
csense 5y ago
I was expecting things like "woman was hit by a car" to be replaced by "A car hit a woman" (prefer active voice). Instead it refers to pedestrians as Vulnerable Road Users. It says the information that "alcohol was not a factor" is a "Distracting counterfactual. Readers place more blame on victims when articles use more counterfactual statements. Counterfactuals also obscure the systemic nature of incidents and place unreasonable burden on individuals." I thought this would be an automated grammar assistant for basic English writing techniques you should have learned in high school. It's not. Instead, it's a tool for injecting bias into reporting.
- sagarm 5y ago
  It's a tool for correcting bias. The corrected version of "woman was hit by a car" (key actor not even mentioned) and "alcohol was not a factor" (unmentioned driver did nothing wrong) is "driver hits woman in unlit crosswalk, third casualty at this intersection this year." The former statements don't challenge the status quo of deadly infrastructure. The latter statement does. Making the driver visible makes it clear to readers that drive that the story isn't one just about other people: they, too, could be doing everything right but still hurt someone.
65536b 5y ago
I'm somewhat concerned about the ethical implications of this beyond the scope of just car crash reporting. While impressive, the nlp model will have to be tuned by someone, someone with biases the model will inevitably inherit. Seems to have obvious potential as a propaganda tool, which might be used by the 'good guys' today, and be used by malicious actors tomorrow.
gok 5y ago
A liar on HN, chiefofgxbxl, died earlier today when he was run over. It was not the driver's fault. It was reported by police that chiefofgxbxl deserved this fate for being a pedestrian in the way of an SUV, and for claiming to use "Natural Language Processing" when all he was really doing was using Javascript to scan text for a hardcoded substring list. Your tool believes this article has no problems.
- dang 5y ago
  I realize this may have been a joke taken too far, but your comment breaks several of the HN guidelines and the Show HN guidelines egregiously. Please make your substantive points without personal attacks in the future! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
yodelshady 5y ago
That's actually pretty amazing work. Being super preachy, as a cliched straight white etc etc... after riding a bike I sort of get complaints about -isms, emotionally, in a way I wouldn't without. Everyone has already concluded that you deserved it. Whatever happened. It does not matter if you were wearing hi-vis, or had a light, or were in a bike lane, or the nearest bike lane is 5 miles away and on the pavement for some reason, or were 3.1 ft from the kerb or 2.6. If you were stopped at a red light and are now sprawled in front of it because a van didn't, you're clearly lying. If a motorist jumps a set of temporary lights and hit you when you had the green, you're clearly lying. You deserved it, always and forever, is the only argument you need to know, the rest is window dressing. Now we wonder why kids don't get exercise.
- butwhywhyoh 5y ago
  I'd love to hear even one anecdote of 'kid believes bikers are unfairly blamed for accidents' -> 'kid decides never to exercise again in any form'
  - burnished 5y ago
    Its more the realization that you aren't safe, and that your safety is not only not a priority but somehow actively repugnant, all due to you being on a bike. If you are a kid driving isn't an option. If you don't feel safe on the roads as a pedestrian or bicyclist then your options are rather limited. This was my own experience, and if I had been less reckless I would have gotten less exercise. As it was, telling some one about a scary experience like a car almost hitting me was usually almost always met with a story about how terrible cyclists are. Its weird.
    - speedybird 5y ago
      Color me unconvinced. Kids know that skateboarding isn't safe but I see plenty of kids skateboarding, many of them without helmets! Generally speaking, I think kids are insensitive to risk and think they're invincible. When weighing the risk of cracked skull against looking uncool with PPE, they often forgo the PPE. I think perception of physical danger is low on the list of reasons why kids don't get as much exercise as they should. Lower on the list than helicopter parents, "stranger danger" paranoia, and the appeal of video games.
Tarrosion 5y ago
A few months ago I wrote a short Twitter rant about a Boston Globe article that described a pedestrian being struck by a driver really poorly. Thread: https://twitter.com/evanjfields/status/1387131251811831812/ https://twitter.com/evanjfields/status/1387131251811831812/ Article: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/27/metro/woman-28-seriously-injured-after-being-hit-by-car-cambridge/ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/27/metro/woman-28-seriou... To my surprise, this tool finds no problems with the article and gives it a B. (I'm really tickled by the tool, like the idea, but based on a totally not rigorous sample, seems like the tool leans a bit too much into sort of sentence structure analysis and elides some semantics?)
- chiefofgxbxl 5y ago
  Thanks for linking this issue, and I'll certainly look into it. I agree with your analysis on Twitter: manually annotating the article should yield the following issues: 1. Focus: she was struck by a Toyota Corolla (emphasis is placed on the VRU) 2. Object: she was struck by a Toyota Corolla (agent is referred to as an object, rather than a person, e.g. driver of the Corolla) 3. Object: a 2010 Toyota Corolla being driven by a 29-year-old Brookline man, was driving east (again, the wording personifies the vehicle instead of assigning agency to the driver heading eastward) I will need to debug this particular example further, but it appears the "2010 Toyota Corolla" and "Toyota Corolla" are not being classified as CARLIKE, a label I trained an NER model on to help deal with all the ways you can name a vehicle: year-make-model, make-model, year-model, model, model-ish, generic terms like truck/pickup/pick-up etc., short-hands like Chevy instead of Chevrolet, etc. Furthermore, the tool is not identifying "woman" as a VRU. It's a little bit ambiguous because while "[she] entered the roadway", it's not 100% clear that means she is a VRU: a driver/vehicle can enter a roadway too.
  - Tarrosion 5y ago
    Interesting context, thanks! Cool tool, will be glad to see it get tuned further :)
elfchief 5y ago
I'd say they should do one of these for police shootings, except the whole system would probably overload and melt down.
eric_the_read 5y ago
I tried it out on https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/07/medina-alert-hit-run-crash-larimer-county/ https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/07/medina-alert-hit-run-c..., which I would think in general a group like Vision Zero would approve of, and it got a C (-1 points), because of the phrase, "[The] vehicle will have heavy damage". This seems pedantic, at best, since the whole point of that phrase is to help the public identify the vehicle (and presumably the driver) which was involved in the accident.
- chiefofgxbxl 5y ago
  Thanks for alerting me to this - that sentence is itself fine, and the tool is incorrectly marking it as problematic. I'll debug that!
u801e 5y ago
For consistency, we should use the term motorist instead of driver. Just like we use cyclist or bicyclist instead of rider or motorcyclist instead of motorcycle rider. The only exception would be for buses or trucks (bus driver of truck driver).
irjustin 5y ago
Super interesting... it's like a linter for car crashes. There are opinions that are not going to be liked (i.e. crash vs accident) but such is the nature of any linter.
snomad 5y ago
I'm curious how a similar tool built for airplane and helicopter crashes. What if it was due to mechanical failure, would you want the story to focus on a mechanic?
EricLeer 5y ago
Slightly related is the crashes[1], which collects reports of crashes in the local news. They do this because they feel that in the news cycle these are heavilly underreported (as compared to for instance a terrorist attack) and therefore they seem less as a problem (to for instance improve infrastructure to reduce the risk of crashes). [1] https://us.thecrashes.org/ https://us.thecrashes.org/

344 points by chiefofgxbxl 5y ago

This is an interesting tool! It would be cool if you could take say 20 articles from Gothamist, Streetsblog, NYT, NY Post, Pix11, etc. and see how they all ranked in this system. That could be a really interesting blog post. -- Which tools are you using for these NLP judgments? Are you using SpaCy at all? Are there any models you've built here, or is this all rules on top of an NLP model? I'm working on NLP models for education, and we use SpaCy a ton. I'm peter@quill.org if you want to learn more about how we're using this.

chiefofgxbxl 5y ago
Thanks! Comparison between news outlets is on the radar, once I improve the tool based on feedback from this Show HN. My backend uses spaCy (NER/NLP), textacy [1] for extracting subject-verb-object triples, and coreferee [2] for coreference resolution. I did build a custom spaCy model for which I manually annotated over 700 crash-related news articles in Label Studio [3]. This custom model identifies counterfactuals, framing (e.g. thematic elements), and what's called CARLIKE, because vehicles can be referred to in so many ways (year-make-model, year-model, color model, generic terms like pickup/sedan/truck, nicknames like Chevy instead of Chevrolet, etc. Coreference resolution was probably my favorite part of the NLP analyzer. For example: "A woman was injured after being struck by a vehicle. She was walking on Washington Street when the incident took place." Now we can identify "woman" as a pedestrian because "she" was walking. Implementing that coreference resolution felt magical, because now the tool can pick up so many more issues that it couldn't before when it only looked at individual sentences. I'll be writing an in-depth article about my implementation and journey, and I'll be sure to shoot you an email to chat with you some time. [1] https://github.com/chartbeat-labs/textacy https://github.com/chartbeat-labs/textacy [2] https://github.com/msg-systems/coreferee https://github.com/msg-systems/coreferee [3] https://labelstud.io/ https://labelstud.io/
- gault8121 5y ago
  Awesome, thanks for following up! We also use coreference resolution - we specifically found Allen NLP's coreference to be the most accurate in an analysis of a few different offerings: http://docs.allennlp.org/v0.9.0/api/allennlp.models.coreference_resolution.html http://docs.allennlp.org/v0.9.0/api/allennlp.models.corefere...

chiefofgxbxl 5y ago

Hi HN, I built "Vision Zero Reporting" (https://visionzeroreporting.com https://visionzeroreporting.com), a tool to detect editorial anti-patterns in local news coverage of car crashes. Maybe you've noticed that local news articles about car crashes, especially those that involve "vulnerable road users" (VRU) such as bicyclists and pedestrians, tend to employ language that seems to blame the victim or only discuss the incident as an isolated event, rather than in context that crashes are preventable and are caused by specific reasons. This tool is meant to help news publishers check their articles and learn the anti-patterns to avoid. Here's a brief explanation of the problems my tool checks for: 1. Focus - Readers find the focus/subject of the sentence more in control of the situation, and hence more blameworthy (e.g. "A pedestrian was struck by a driver" VS "A driver struck a pedestrian"). 2. Agency - Some sentences lack an agent altogether, which places more blame on the recipient (e.g. "A bicyclist was hit." VS "A bicyclist was hit by a driver.") 3. Object-based reference - Pedestrians and bicyclists are almost always referred to using people-based language, but drivers are referred to using object-based language 81% of the time [1] (e.g. "The vehicle fled the scene" VS "The driver fled the scene"). This language personifies and gives agency to vehicles rather than their drivers. 4. Accident - Accident is the most-used term in articles to describe the incident (47%). This term is being phased out by some news agencies because the word implies a sense of inevitability or that it happened purely by chance, when we know why car crashes happen and can take preventative action. 5. Framing - (still in beta) Articles employ an "episodic" frame, meaning they describe crashes as isolated incidents. Only 6% (!) of articles use "thematic" framing [1], meaning they contextualize the event by discussing road design, number of recent crashes in the area, quote experts, educate readers about road safety initiatives, etc. 6. Counterfactual - (still in beta) Counterfactuals are true statements, but imply the outcome could have been changed had the victim acted differently. While reporters may see these statements as sticking-to-the-facts, we've discovered in 700+ manually-annotated articles that counterfactuals almost always shift blame toward the victim (A bicyclist was struck; he wasn't wearing a helmet. It was dark outside, the biker wasn't wearing reflective clothing, and the driver told police he didn't see the bicyclist until it was too late.) Notice that all of these statements may be true, but goes hand-in-hand with the Framing issue discussed above: the bicyclist was hit, but is that because there is no protected bike lane? It was dark outside, but is road visibility a municipal obligation? I'm looking for constructive feedback to make this tool better! My work is based primarily on the following research papers (and I've already shown the tool to the authors - they loved it!): [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330975590_Editorial_Patterns_in_Bicyclist_and_Pedestrian_Crash_Reporting https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330975590_Editorial... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337279845_Does_news_coverage_of_traffic_crashes_affect_perceived_blame_and_preferred_solutions_Evidence_from_an_experiment https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337279845_Does_news...

04rob 5y ago

Is the source code available? It would be interesting to apply this to reporting on other topics. As far as suggestions, it would be great to see an explanation of each problem when hovering over it in the text. Also, the colors for the "Object", "Counterfactuals", and "Accident" problems are difficult to distinguish for color-deficient individuals.

UncleEntity 5y ago

> "The vehicle fled the scene" VS "The driver fled the scene" It is quite common for the driver to flee the scene while leaving behind the disabled vehicle. …one of my old coworker’s vehicle was involved in an accident with a pedestrian who ran full speed in front of her while it was dark outside and the vehicle was traveling at the legal speed limit. Said vehicle was unable to stop in time which resulted in the speeding pedestrian striking the vehicle.

renewiltord 5y ago
Are you sure it wasn’t that the road moved under the pedestrian’s feet locating her in front of the vehicle comoving with the road in one direction and along it in another? I think you haven’t presented evidence.

ipsin 5y ago

It would be nice if the color-coded key ("Object", etc.) linked to the detailed sections below. When I first saw "Object" in the summary, I didn't know what it meant.

ape4 5y ago

Instead of just "a woman was killed" it could mention the devastating effect to her family.

karaterobot 5y ago
How does the program know how the family reacted?
- ape4 5y ago
  The program just needs to flag if this info is missing.

podiki 5y ago

Very nice, I like it! And as a frequent cyclist and writing instructor, really appreciate this kind of work on many levels. Good to see NLP towards social good like this.

PaulHoule 5y ago

I like it. I like that it tags segments of text as opposed to the document as a whole. Since it is confined to a domain and has a well-chosen problem it seems to be highly correct and thus useful.

mtlynch 5y ago

This is cool! I appreciate the effort here to make the roads safer for bicyclists and pedestrians, as I'd love to see more people prioritize this. The homepage confused me because the presentation of the two examples made me think that they were before/after at first. It took me ~30s to realize they were just two separate articles. I'd like to see a bad article juxtaposed with an improved version that someone created using your tool. I'm maybe used to tools like Grammarly, but when I clicked / hovered over the highlighted text, I was surprised to see nothing happen. I found it a little difficult to scroll back and forth between the highlighted text and the context where it appeared in the article. Having an explanation appear next to the cursor on mouse click/hover might resolve this. It would also be cool if the tool allowed me to import by URL (with some suggested real articles to show this is a problem in mainstream news sources) rather than require the user to copy/paste manually.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I think this is going to be a major application for "attempting" to identify "types" of biases. I'm being super cautious here because the term bias is painfully misunderstood in most circumstances and often misused as a cudgel rather than a context. But I think it could be educational to observe cultural/social/political trends by distilling content this way.

paulgb 5y ago

I like it! I assume the red/yellow/green are roughly bad/warning/good, but what do the blue highlights mean? I agree with another comment that a tooltip to say which of the categories you listed a given span falls into.

rootusrootus 5y ago

I gather that the intent is not to make the reporting more neutral or accurate, but to change the framing in a direction that vision zero finds more appealing. E.g. in the first article we should view the woman as a vulnerable road user, bearing no responsibility for being struck by a vehicle even though video evidence shows that she fell into the street.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Yes, I do not think you bear responsibility if you collapse and someone strikes you with their car and then flees the scene.
- JackFr 5y ago
  Don’t be obtuse. A person collapses into the street and is struck by oncoming traffic - no one is to blame. It is an accident.
  - dfxm12 5y ago
    Who's being obtuse? It looks like neither you nor the parent comment assign blame to the woman that the driver struck. From here, it looks like you are in agreement. The parent comment didn't even say one way or another if the driver who struck the woman should get any blame...
  - ecshafer 5y ago
    If someone collapses into the street, the driver should be able to stop in time, unless they are going to fast. Who I can think to blame here: * The auto manufacturer for not having sensors to detect this. * The city for making car dependent areas * The city for making roads that have cars drive so fast by pedestrians, that the pedestrian can die if hit * The driver for not driving more reasonably * The city for not having a barrier between the sidewalk and the road, China has these in a lot of areas, a curb with a hedge between the side walks and roads, or a fence. The pedestrian who collapses is the last to blame in my view.

dymk 5y ago

This is neat, but something bugs me about the framing of the intended goal versus how you propose to get there. If the intent is to raise public awareness and to put pressure on leadership to make roads generally safer, why do almost all the corrections follow a pattern of shifting blame from the individual pedestrian onto the individual driver? Many of the suggested fixes are just their own form of counterfactual - they're facts, sure, but they don't contribute to public understanding of _why_ the crash happened. The examples of removing counterfactual outright and including thematic framing (focusing on road conditions, frequency of crashes, and aggregate statistics that tell the story of how often crashes occur) seem to be the best set of suggestions for correcting public perception on road safety. Not making sure the public knows this _one specific driver_ hit a pedestrian, rather than their car.

tshaddox 5y ago
Couldn’t part of the larger “why?” be that individual drivers are not sufficiently subject to liability for causing accidents with pedestrians, cyclists, etc.? If it is the case that it’s almost impossible for a driver to get in any trouble for causing such an accident (except in the most egregious cases of reckless driving) then it doesn’t make sense to avoid talking about that.
- ryantgtg 5y ago
  I can see value in not consistently talking about “btw killing someone with your car is basically a get out of jail card”. Most people probably don’t realize this. (Or am I misunderstanding your last sentence?)
advisedwang 5y ago
I agree, the best outcome would be if news stories said things like * "5 crashes have happened at this intersection so far this year" * "The speed limit at the crash site was 35, above the standard arterial speed limit of 25" * "The road at the bend had sharrow markings, which cycling advocates say are ineffective and inferior to marked or protected bike lines."
bluGill 5y ago

briandear 5y ago

This could also be used for gun crime reporting as well.

aerostable_slug 5y ago
That would be politically infeasible. The overwhelming narrative would be "young black male gang member kills other young black male gang member, destroying the hopes and dreams Victim A's grandmother had for him", and that already doesn't get widely reported. https://heyjackass.com/ https://heyjackass.com/

natch 5y ago

To better understand what their intent is, I recommend clicking on the little hamburger menu at the top and reading the “Issues” page listed there.

natch 5y ago

As feedback, speaking of contextualizing things, it would help if you would contextualize your colored highlighting by bringing some of the explanations of issues onto the page itself where the content is marked up. Or have links (maybe have the highlighted words be links) going to a writeup telling why those words got that color.

jasonhansel 5y ago

Worth noting the history behind this issue of biased reporting: > In the late 1920s and ’30s, a consortium of automobile manufacturers, insurers, and fuel companies known as the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce funded a wire service that provided free reporting on crashes to short-staffed Depression-era newspapers. Reporters could send in a few basic details about a local collision, and the wire service would craft a narrative that exonerated the driver, blamed any pedestrians who were involved, and — crucially — transformed virtually every “crash” into an understandable or even inevitable “accident.” Newspapers around the country published the industry-approved stories, often without edits. Source: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/03/05/streetsblog-101-how-journalists-help-build-car-culture/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/03/05/streetsblog-101-how-j...

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fermigier 5y ago

I like the general idea, and the use of NLP to implement it. But I am dubious about some of the principles behind it. - For example, I find it inaccurate to say "the driver hit the pedestrian", which to me suggests a collision between two people, not between a person and a vehicle. (Of course this does not apply to a phrase like "the vehicle fled the scene" - it is clear that it was the driver who fled the scene). While it's obvious the driver is responsible for the trajectory of their vehicle, it's also clear that the injuries and deaths are caused by the fact that one of the elements involved in the collusion is a 1+ ton piece of steel, and the other one a 70kg human being. - Regarding the term "accident", I see in the Merriam-Webster that it is defined in this context as: "an unfortunate event resulting in particular from negligence or ignorance". It seems to me that this definition does not exonerate the driver from responsibility (lack of vigilance or competence).

FabHK 5y ago
> Regarding the term "accident" I think in aviation circles the word "accident" is disliked because it implies a certain inevitability and tends to terminate the search for further underlying causes. If it's a crash, then we find out why, and if it happened because there was some debris on the runway or a certain switch in the cockpit was in the wrong position, then we need to find out how that could have happened and what to undertake to make sure it doesn't happen again.
PeterisP 5y ago
I find "the vehicle fled the scene" as a useful phrase that's used to distinguish this situation from the very different "the driver fled the scene" which is commonly used in the (not that rare) cases where the driver abandons the wrecked car after an accident, in some cases to hide that they were intoxicated.
- fn-mote 5y ago
  I disagree. Shifting the agency to the driver is important enough to my that I recommend writers use "the driver fled the scene on foot" if that's what happened. (This particular phrase is actually used.) It seems obvious that "the vehicle" is not doing the fleeing, so even if this is standard phrasing it should be revised.

xraystyle 5y ago

> Show HN: Ensure all car crash articles are biased against the driver and vehicles generally using NLP Seems like a better title for this. In the analysis of the first article, under the "recommendations" about counterfactuals, it's literally telling you to remove relevant context about the incident, to ensure the readers can't possibly come to the "wrong" conclusion about who's responsible. Distrust of news media is at an all-time high[1] and if people can't see how this sort of thing contributes, I really don't know what to say at this point. 1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrustful-mass-media.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrus...

kazinator 5y ago

I don't think that "the cyclist was not wearing a helmet" or "impairment was not an issue" are examples of counterfactuals; the authors should crack open a dictionary look up what that word means in general use, and additionally how it is used in philosophy and science. If you have word from the police that the driver was not found to have any alcohol or if the cyclist wasn't wearing a helmet, those are simply facts, not counterfactuals. (An article about an accident should report all the hitherto known facts; then it can't be accused of having a bias with regard to cherry-picking the facts.) There is a problem with "alcohol doesn't appear to be a factor" in that it lacks conclusiveness. Appear to whom? For what reasons, and why aren't they sure? The driver was able to touch their nose with their eyes closed, is that it? I think a reasonable rule should be to cull any probabilistic statements, or statements with hedge words introducing uncertainty: remove all such statements from third parties, and under no circumstances invent new probabilistic statements in the process of editorializing. In fact, it's the use of the word accident that may have the counterfactual issue (and good point here). There is a supposition behind it which may be false. Maybe it wasn't an accident? You can't logically call a pedestrian hit an accident until other hypotheses have been ruled out, like the driver had a specific murder motive, or is crazy. It's also hard to call it an accident if the driver was blatantly reckless: acted contrary to the rules of the road which are intended to prevent such occurrences, and which the driver is legally obliged to follow as a matter of licensing. If a walking person falls into a fountain due to texting on their phone, it's difficult to swallow the word accident, since they were practically begging for something to happen by moving through an environment while choosing to block it out.

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chiefofgxbxl 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback. There seems to be some conflict with how to define "counterfactual". Merriam-Webster defines it as "contrary to fact" [1], so that comes down to a statement being either true or false. But the way I'm using it (and the research my work is based off) aligns more with the Cambridge dictionary usage: "thinking about what did not happen but could have happened, or relating to this kind of thinking" [2]. Further, Stanford Philosophy states, "Modal discourse concerns alternative ways things can be, e.g., what might be true, what isn’t true but could have been, what should be done. This entry focuses on counterfactual modality which concerns what is not, but could or would have been." [3] > If you have word from the police that the driver was not found to have any alcohol or if the cyclist wasn't wearing a helmet, those are simply facts, not counterfactuals. I do believe these are counterfactuals, consistent with definitions from [2] and [3]. For example, if a bicyclist is hit and killed and the news article states the fact he wasn't wearing a helmet, sometimes it feels like the article is insinuating that if the bicyclist had been wearing a helmet, he would have survived. Of course, we cannot know that without investigating how fast the driver was going, how heavy the colliding vehicle was, etc. Some of those crashes are simply unsurvivable. The article espouses a "what could have been" thought. Please feel free to disagree, but provide links so I can read more. > You can't logically call a pedestrian hit an accident until other hypotheses have been ruled out I agree, but it seems that journalists take a different view. They see "crash" as intentional (i.e. you used your vehicle to murder someone), and that's why they use the word "accident". The way I see it, accident implies the incident was unforeseeable and unpreventable. I also think "accident" requires a higher burden of proof: just like all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares, I think all accidents are crashes, but not all crashes are accidents. In the absence of a conclusive police investigation demonstrating complete unavoidability, the word accident should not be used. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/counterfactual https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/counterfactual [2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/counterfactual https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/counterf... [3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/counterfactuals/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/counterfactuals/

beaconstudios 5y ago

this seems to me like it's designed to shift the blame from unilaterally on the VRU (bad), to unilaterally on the driver (also bad). You pay lip service to systemic problems, but this is not a systemic approach to reducing crashes; it just implies that the driver is at fault, which is not always the case in these things. As another comment noted, reporters would do well to highlight the context around the crash if there's no clear fault (such as an intoxicated or negligent driver, or a pedestrian running into the road within minimum braking distance), such as lack of bike lanes, blind corners, etc that would apply pressure to authorities to make the roads safer. Not all crashes can be default-blamed on the driver.

codezero 5y ago
If a Cessna crashes into a car, is it safe to blame the Cessna and not the car, rather than treat it as a special case? I'm sure a car could swerve onto a runway mid-landing, but it would be the exception to the rule, right? When operating a car you should be expected to be in a heightened state of awareness and responsibility because of your capacity to cause damage, compared to a pedestrian. The bias in the current narrative (against pedestrians who have little autonomy vs a car) is so strongly on the wrong side that I don't think asking for a middle-ground approach is worth arguing. I can't tell you how many times I've read stuff like this: https://www.bikelaw.com/2021/10/waller-bike-crash/ https://www.bikelaw.com/2021/10/waller-bike-crash/
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  I think that's a false choice; rather than choosing between anti-VRU bias (as present) and anti-driver bias (as proposed), why not choose to report the specific facts of the incident at hand? Blaming one party all the time is stupid, because one party is not always at fault. Edit: Your cessna example makes no sense, as cars and planes do not generally share space. Should bikes and cars share space? No, but that's part of the systemic aspect of the problem.
  - codezero 5y ago
    I am arguing people and cars don't generally share space either. When a car hits a person, it's rare and I do think it should bias against the large, dangerous hardware, while also examining the facts. We have a century of bias-towards-cars coverage which permeates all society, police officers writing their reports are biased from what they've read and how they are trained, I don't think it's an over correction to default to assuming the larger, more regulated and dangerous side of any collision is by default assumed to be at fault, and for the other side to be the exception to the rule. I say this as a person who's driven a car for 25 years and never hit any people, and who has been hit by a car by a driver who wasn't paying attention multiple times. What's worse, is drivers are often angry at cyclists for even existing, rather than taking responsibility for being aware of their surroundings. The cessna example is a little over the top, but not totally out of line as a metaphor.

dash2 5y ago

I'm afraid I find this somewhere between creepy and ridiculous. On the ridiculous side: the idea that calling a car accident an "accident" is somehow wrong - as if, because I understand that what happened was an accident, I am somehow incapable of thinking "hey, maybe we need better road safety legislation". On the creepy side: the general approach which is, instead of making public arguments about why cars are bad, to manipulate language so as to push people to your side, using results from behavioural science. Of course, if you think the author is on the side of the angels, then this is great! But the techniques can be used by equally self-righteous people, with whom you may disagree. Treating people like sheep is gross. Don't do it.

dml2135 5y ago
The issue is that the term accident implies a lack of intension, while in most crash reporting we actually have no idea if the collision was intentional, negligent, or whatever. Using a term like crash or collision is actually much closer to the bare facts.
- fermigier 5y ago
  As I have stated in another comment, according to Merriam-Webster, a (car) accident is "an unfortunate event resulting in particular from negligence or ignorance". It doesn't imply intention (in which case it would become a homicide, in the case the victim is deceased), but certainly implies responsibility from the driver.
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ihaveajob 5y ago
The problem with using "accident" as the default term is that it preempts any evidence-finding, implying that it was nobody's fault. If someone shoots their gun randomly and someone gets hurt by just being there, nobody will call it an "accident", but somehow if the weapon is a car, the driver gets the benefit of the doubt regardless of the facts.

chana_masala 5y ago

I hope you can look past the negative responses here. I think this is very well intentioned and well done. It would be nice to see more rationale on the website like what you've written here

markstos 5y ago

Here’s why the reframing matters: Accidents are “oops” that are to accepted as fact of life. The no reason to change the system. Accidents happen. Crashes are not accidents. They have a cause and the cause can addressed. Crashes can be prevented. So the reframing shifts from talking about a system we should accept how it is to one that can be improved.

karaterobot 5y ago
It would be inaccurate, unethical, and potentially libelous for any newspaper to construe the events of a potential criminal act (or any event, really) without doing any investigation to support that conclusion, and primarily in order to further an editorial agenda.
- markstos 5y ago
  I've been employed as a newspaper editor and am familiar with libel laws and the ethics of journalism. What's been advocated for is accurate reporting, not conclusion-jumping. Currently there are headlines like this: "Car hits cyclist" Why is a victim a person but the actor is an inanimate object? They don't say "car hits bike". A more accurate headline would be "Car driver hits cyclist". The other way to improve reporting is to call a preventable crash what it is, a crash and not an "accident". More here: https://www.bicycling.com/news/a20049939/five-cyclist-blaming-headlines-and-how-to-reframe-them/ https://www.bicycling.com/news/a20049939/five-cyclist-blamin...
  - karaterobot 5y ago
    > Why is a victim a person but the actor is an inanimate object? To humanize the victim without ascribing blame, when blame is unknown. For the same reason you wouldn't have a headline that read "Alice killed Bob with her car": even though that may technically be true, it's needlessly critical. Needless from the perspective of an editorially neutral party, like a newspaper, but not from the perspective of an activist, like this website.
    - 5y ago

uDontKnowMe 5y ago

Thank you so much for this, it's great work!

gSdYMA 5y ago

Does anyone know who is behind that project? Who is developing it?

csense 5y ago

I was expecting things like "woman was hit by a car" to be replaced by "A car hit a woman" (prefer active voice). Instead it refers to pedestrians as Vulnerable Road Users. It says the information that "alcohol was not a factor" is a "Distracting counterfactual. Readers place more blame on victims when articles use more counterfactual statements. Counterfactuals also obscure the systemic nature of incidents and place unreasonable burden on individuals." I thought this would be an automated grammar assistant for basic English writing techniques you should have learned in high school. It's not. Instead, it's a tool for injecting bias into reporting.

sagarm 5y ago
It's a tool for correcting bias. The corrected version of "woman was hit by a car" (key actor not even mentioned) and "alcohol was not a factor" (unmentioned driver did nothing wrong) is "driver hits woman in unlit crosswalk, third casualty at this intersection this year." The former statements don't challenge the status quo of deadly infrastructure. The latter statement does. Making the driver visible makes it clear to readers that drive that the story isn't one just about other people: they, too, could be doing everything right but still hurt someone.

65536b 5y ago

I'm somewhat concerned about the ethical implications of this beyond the scope of just car crash reporting. While impressive, the nlp model will have to be tuned by someone, someone with biases the model will inevitably inherit. Seems to have obvious potential as a propaganda tool, which might be used by the 'good guys' today, and be used by malicious actors tomorrow.

gok 5y ago

A liar on HN, chiefofgxbxl, died earlier today when he was run over. It was not the driver's fault. It was reported by police that chiefofgxbxl deserved this fate for being a pedestrian in the way of an SUV, and for claiming to use "Natural Language Processing" when all he was really doing was using Javascript to scan text for a hardcoded substring list. Your tool believes this article has no problems.

dang 5y ago
I realize this may have been a joke taken too far, but your comment breaks several of the HN guidelines and the Show HN guidelines egregiously. Please make your substantive points without personal attacks in the future! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

yodelshady 5y ago

That's actually pretty amazing work. Being super preachy, as a cliched straight white etc etc... after riding a bike I sort of get complaints about -isms, emotionally, in a way I wouldn't without. Everyone has already concluded that you deserved it. Whatever happened. It does not matter if you were wearing hi-vis, or had a light, or were in a bike lane, or the nearest bike lane is 5 miles away and on the pavement for some reason, or were 3.1 ft from the kerb or 2.6. If you were stopped at a red light and are now sprawled in front of it because a van didn't, you're clearly lying. If a motorist jumps a set of temporary lights and hit you when you had the green, you're clearly lying. You deserved it, always and forever, is the only argument you need to know, the rest is window dressing. Now we wonder why kids don't get exercise.

butwhywhyoh 5y ago
I'd love to hear even one anecdote of 'kid believes bikers are unfairly blamed for accidents' -> 'kid decides never to exercise again in any form'
- burnished 5y ago
  Its more the realization that you aren't safe, and that your safety is not only not a priority but somehow actively repugnant, all due to you being on a bike. If you are a kid driving isn't an option. If you don't feel safe on the roads as a pedestrian or bicyclist then your options are rather limited. This was my own experience, and if I had been less reckless I would have gotten less exercise. As it was, telling some one about a scary experience like a car almost hitting me was usually almost always met with a story about how terrible cyclists are. Its weird.
  - speedybird 5y ago
    Color me unconvinced. Kids know that skateboarding isn't safe but I see plenty of kids skateboarding, many of them without helmets! Generally speaking, I think kids are insensitive to risk and think they're invincible. When weighing the risk of cracked skull against looking uncool with PPE, they often forgo the PPE. I think perception of physical danger is low on the list of reasons why kids don't get as much exercise as they should. Lower on the list than helicopter parents, "stranger danger" paranoia, and the appeal of video games.

Tarrosion 5y ago

A few months ago I wrote a short Twitter rant about a Boston Globe article that described a pedestrian being struck by a driver really poorly. Thread: https://twitter.com/evanjfields/status/1387131251811831812/ https://twitter.com/evanjfields/status/1387131251811831812/ Article: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/27/metro/woman-28-seriously-injured-after-being-hit-by-car-cambridge/ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/27/metro/woman-28-seriou... To my surprise, this tool finds no problems with the article and gives it a B. (I'm really tickled by the tool, like the idea, but based on a totally not rigorous sample, seems like the tool leans a bit too much into sort of sentence structure analysis and elides some semantics?)

chiefofgxbxl 5y ago
Thanks for linking this issue, and I'll certainly look into it. I agree with your analysis on Twitter: manually annotating the article should yield the following issues: 1. Focus: she was struck by a Toyota Corolla (emphasis is placed on the VRU) 2. Object: she was struck by a Toyota Corolla (agent is referred to as an object, rather than a person, e.g. driver of the Corolla) 3. Object: a 2010 Toyota Corolla being driven by a 29-year-old Brookline man, was driving east (again, the wording personifies the vehicle instead of assigning agency to the driver heading eastward) I will need to debug this particular example further, but it appears the "2010 Toyota Corolla" and "Toyota Corolla" are not being classified as CARLIKE, a label I trained an NER model on to help deal with all the ways you can name a vehicle: year-make-model, make-model, year-model, model, model-ish, generic terms like truck/pickup/pick-up etc., short-hands like Chevy instead of Chevrolet, etc. Furthermore, the tool is not identifying "woman" as a VRU. It's a little bit ambiguous because while "[she] entered the roadway", it's not 100% clear that means she is a VRU: a driver/vehicle can enter a roadway too.
- Tarrosion 5y ago
  Interesting context, thanks! Cool tool, will be glad to see it get tuned further :)

elfchief 5y ago

I'd say they should do one of these for police shootings, except the whole system would probably overload and melt down.

eric_the_read 5y ago

I tried it out on https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/07/medina-alert-hit-run-crash-larimer-county/ https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/07/medina-alert-hit-run-c..., which I would think in general a group like Vision Zero would approve of, and it got a C (-1 points), because of the phrase, "[The] vehicle will have heavy damage". This seems pedantic, at best, since the whole point of that phrase is to help the public identify the vehicle (and presumably the driver) which was involved in the accident.

chiefofgxbxl 5y ago
Thanks for alerting me to this - that sentence is itself fine, and the tool is incorrectly marking it as problematic. I'll debug that!

u801e 5y ago

For consistency, we should use the term motorist instead of driver. Just like we use cyclist or bicyclist instead of rider or motorcyclist instead of motorcycle rider. The only exception would be for buses or trucks (bus driver of truck driver).

irjustin 5y ago

Super interesting... it's like a linter for car crashes. There are opinions that are not going to be liked (i.e. crash vs accident) but such is the nature of any linter.

snomad 5y ago

I'm curious how a similar tool built for airplane and helicopter crashes. What if it was due to mechanical failure, would you want the story to focus on a mechanic?

EricLeer 5y ago

Slightly related is the crashes[1], which collects reports of crashes in the local news. They do this because they feel that in the news cycle these are heavilly underreported (as compared to for instance a terrorist attack) and therefore they seem less as a problem (to for instance improve infrastructure to reduce the risk of crashes). [1] https://us.thecrashes.org/ https://us.thecrashes.org/