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

by chiefofgxbxl • 5 years ago

344 204 5 years ago

Hi HN,

I built "Vision Zero Reporting" (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...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337279845_Does_news...

PaulHoule• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

04rob• 5 years 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.

SavantIdiot• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

rootusrootus2• 5 years 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.

karaterobot5• 5 years ago

Yeah, this is a little odd to me. The app frames itself as a way to improve reporting, but the way it intends to improve it is by imposing an inherently less neutral position on the language used. There's no fact-checking going on here that would lead the program to decide the original report was incorrect and needed updating, except that it doesn't frame the story in the designer's point of view. An extremely postmodern app.

It's possible (and not unlikely) that this is how more news will be processed in the future.

whimsicalism• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

dml21354• 5 years ago

You're right that the intent is not to make the reporting more neutral, but you are missing the point -- the reporting is not neutral to begin with.

Take an example from the tool: - The SUV crashed into the woman. vs - The driver crashed into the woman.

It is not that one of these statements is "neutral" while the other one is biased. In both cases, the author is making a choice of emphasis.

What Vision Zero advocates is that the former's emphasis is the wrong one, and that ascribing more agency (not necessarily blame, but agency) to drivers is the right emphasis to take. But no one is saying that that the choice of words is not subjective either way.

chiefofgxbxl9• 5 years ago

Respectfully, I think you're demonstrating the sort of thinking the corpus of research surrounding this seeks to shine a spotlight on: blaming the victim, rather than focusing on safe and forgiving design.

Should our built environment be such that falling down in public should end your life? Do people deserve to die simply because they want to cross the street? Why do we design residential neighborhoods where parents are afraid of letting their kids play outside due to traffic? Do drivers of 4,000+ lbs of steel and glass bear greater responsibility than pedestrians and bicyclists.

In the article you mention with the woman falling into the street, the article makes no mention of street design. Further, emphasis is placed on the victim, but nothing is said of the driver.

- What is the speed limit on that road? Fast-moving vehicles will require faster reaction time and longer stopping distances. Maybe areas that mix traffic with VRUs need to be reworked.

- Did the driver appear to make any effort to stop? If so, why doesn't the article mention it if they already have video evidence? If not, did the driver not see the woman? Was the driver distracted?

- Did poor illumination contribute to this collision? (If so, that's a design element: street lighting).

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.

I'm posting this to demonstrate my work and seek honest and meaningful criticism to improve the tool and help improve public discourse around a public safety matter that is killing 30k-40k people per year in the U.S., and injuring millions. You can avoid the underhanded and snarky quip.

MauranKilom3• 5 years ago

Calling them "editorial anti-patterns" because they don't frame the discussion how you would like it to be framed is... well, an antipattern in itself.

Let me be clear: Your goal of improving road safety is laudable, and the aspects your tool highlights are conceivably a way to achieve that. But priming visitors to expect "editorial anti-patterns" and then instead presenting "insufficiently biased-to-the-pedestrian" snippets is dishonest.

While there are recommendations in there I fully support (e.g. "highlight systematic problems"), I am particularly put off by repeated suggestions like "the driver hit the cyclist": Unless the driver itself physically made contact with the cyclist, this is between inaccurate and confusing. It sounds like a fist fight broke out when the fundamental happening was someone being injured by sudden contact with a vehicle.

You can still involve the driver in the sentence if needed, but please don't advocate for confusing reporting in the name of unconditionally blaming individuals.

Also, suggestion for an addition: If you want to improve road safety, you could also recommend report on the maintenance status of the vehicle (e.g. were the brakes well-serviced?).

015a• 5 years ago

To be fair: The model does not appear to automate remediation. It just highlights problems.

Also: If all of this is done toward the goal of reducing vehicle-related pedestrian deaths, maybe the dictionary says that's technically a bias, but I have a hard time seeing the argument that its a reprehensible one. Pedestrians may bear some responsibility; the driver is not always at fault; at the end of the day, a pedestrian has never killed a driver. The point here isn't/shouldn't be about fault; its about underscoring a power imbalance.

Have you ever heard the old saying: If the team succeeds, its everyone's success; if the team fails, its the manager's failure? Same thing. In situations of power imbalance, it is Good to bias fault toward power. As they say: with great power, comes great responsibility. Most drivers on American roads have zero sense of responsibility.

dymk5• 5 years 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.

advisedwang• 5 years 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."

bluGill4• 5 years ago

One way to make roads safer is to make better drivers. There is a lot of training and continuing education that can be done to make better drivers. It is far too easy to drive, and once you get your license it is very hard to lose it even as your body degrades to the point you cannot see. People think of bad driving tickets (mostly speeding) as just a price you pay to drive. I've never heard of someone getting a tailgating ticket even though it is rare to see someone maintain their proper following distance in traffic.

Don't take the above as excusing bad road design.

kwhitefoot• 5 years ago

very hard to lose it even as your body degrades to the point you cannot see.

People bring this up often. As far as I can tell such people are not heavily represented in car crash statistics.

karaterobot5• 5 years ago

Let's say all that is true. How does using a computer program to reword all traffic accident reports as being caused by drivers solve this problem? Doesn't it just make people trust accident reports less?

nradov• 5 years ago

My optometrist told me that when he first started his clinical practice he was shocked to discover how many people are driving around with serious visual impairment.

dionidium5• 5 years ago

People think of bad driving tickets (mostly speeding) as just a price you pay to drive.

Furthermore, we literally use the phrase, "never got so much as a speeding ticket" to suggest that speeding is the epitome of a minor, inconsequential infraction, when the reality is that we know speeding is a significant cause of and contributor to death, destruction, and injury in automobile crashes.

AJ007• 5 years ago

The amazing thing is how many of the most egregious incidents involve drivers with suspended licenses or no licenses. At the moment, in the US, due to bail reform consequences are minimal unless someone is actual killed.

lkrubner• 5 years ago

I live in the USA. My friend Kristin is from Germany. She got her driver's license in Germany when she was 28. She trained awhile for it and then took 3 tests: city driving, highway driving, and nighttime driving. From how she described it, the training and the testing was much more rigorous than anything that has existed in the USA.

seltzered_• 5 years ago

This is a complicated topic. One thing I can recall is that there's more pedestrian collisions as there's been more safety technologies and larger cars and average vehicle miles travelled (can't find the study, this might be a lead: https://safetrec.berkeley.edu/news/new-release-2020-safetrec... )

Karrot_Kream6• 5 years ago

The US is so car dependent that it's very politically fraught to make it harder to get a driver's license. Not allowing a person to drive in much of the US is a matter of equity; people that can't drive can't make it to their jobs, can't buy their groceries, etc. What that means of course is that the US usually just knowingly increases the risk of non-drivers because of its brittle dependence on cars, and thus disincentivizes people in most parts of the US from ever not-driving. Woe to you if you don't drive because the US isn't setup for transit equity.

tshaddox• 5 years 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.

ryantgtg4• 5 years 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?)

chiefofgxbxl9• 5 years ago

This is a great question and I agree with you entirely.

Ultimately, Framing (thematic vs. episodic) is the most important consideration for these articles. It's important for articles to discuss road design, safety initiatives, etc. in order to equip readers with the knowledge necessary to get governments to act.

However, Framing is also the most difficult pattern to detect simply because there are so many different thematic elements you can discuss, and many different ways to say each one. Here are a few examples:

- This is the 3rd pedestrian fatality this year.

- Residents have long complained about people racing down their street.

- Washington St. has had a long lasting problem with weather-related crashes.

- According to the NHTSA, there are X crashes per year related to prescription drug-induced drowsy driving.

- Street width directly correlates with driving speed, which in turn increases the time needed to react and brake.

I'm relying on manually annotated articles (700+ so far) and a custom-trained spaCy model to detect these elements, and the accuracy of that model depends on having enough training data. Since thematic elements are so rare in real-life articles, I'm having a difficult time providing enough training data. Hence why the tool emphasizes the other editorial anti-patterns, for now, but this will change once the Framing reporter gets better.

Anyone have any suggestions for augmenting my training set for thematic elements?

Bermion2• 5 years ago

We need to limit speed and the amount of interactions between cars and pedestrians. This will necessarily be at the expense of the drivers who will have to drive slower and get less space since they have historically been prioritized.

It is much easier to implement the necessary measures (against the will of many drivers) if it is clear that drivers run over people, not that people accidentally end up under cars.

dymk5• 5 years ago

I agree that roads need lower speed-limits and to be made safer by their geometry. That's done by reporting on the unsafe conditions of the road.

It does no good to play this game of rhetoric, reframing the matter so the driver is at fault (which is not always the case). A driver does not decide to not run over a person because they think a news story will be more accusatory of them.

aclarry• 5 years ago

But the solution that comes out of that framing is to somehow shame drivers into being better, as opposed to making roads better.

benatkin• 5 years ago

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?

I think "almost all" would have to include the various use of the word accident when the fault hasn't been fully determined. I've been following Project Zero for years now and that is a big part of our shtick. And that certainly is not shifting the blame from the pedestrian to the driver. It is merely removing a harmful assumption.

throwaway0a5e9• 5 years ago

why do almost all the corrections follow a pattern of shifting blame from the individual pedestrian onto the individual driver?

Because the overwhelming majority of multi-party crashes involve one party violating the norms of how whatever traffic type they are is expected by the rest of the traffic to behave and shaming people is, for better or worse, an effective means of motivating specific behavior.

avianlyric2• 5 years ago

In all of these scenarios the driver is the better protected and less vulnerable participant.

Ideally we should be improving infrastructure to ensure that the risks created by high speed lumps of metal is reduced as far as practically possible. But until that happens, we have to acknowledge that in the majority incidents drivers are only ones capable of changing the outcome. Additionally drivers should take one a greater responsibility when operating vehicles in areas where they might encounter more vulnerable road users. Vulnerable road users will always end up paying a substantially greater price in any incident, so it’s reasonable to ask drivers to be more careful to avoid those incidents.

cranky908canuck• 5 years ago

Not sure if there's overshoot, but seems like it's trying to shift from:

A car hit a cyclist/pedestrian

to:

A person driving a car struck (with the car) a person who was [on a bicycle]/walking.

The issue is, "hit by a car" moves the focus away from what the person driving the car was/was not doing at the time.

ziml772• 5 years ago

I disagree. Framing it as anything other than the driver causing the crash makes it too easy for people to blame everything but themselves. Drivers need to understand the dangers of the road and drive in ways that make sense given all the conditions.

briandear• 5 years ago

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

aerostable_slug• 5 years 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/

natch2• 5 years 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.

natch2• 5 years 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.

ape42• 5 years ago

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

karaterobot5• 5 years ago

How does the program know how the family reacted?

ape42• 5 years ago

The program just needs to flag if this info is missing.

jasonhansel• 5 years 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-j...

podiki• 5 years 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.

fermigier2• 5 years 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).

PeterisP• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

dml21354• 5 years ago

Easy to have both -- "the driver fled the scene in their vehicle"

6gvONxR4sf7o2• 5 years ago

the driver hit the pedestrian

It seems reasonable to me. Imagine you’re driving and you hit a deer. What do you say when you tell the story? “My car hit a deer this morning on my way to work!” or “I hit a deer this morning on my way to work!” Even my “Imagine you’re driving and you hit a deer” sentence reads weirdly in the non-person-based language.

If accuracy or confusion is still the issue “the assailant hit the victim” could be amended to “the assailant hit the victim with a baseball bat” to clarify.

Defenestresque• 5 years ago

It's funny you mention this particular phrasing. I used to work as a 911/police dispatcher so I was often literally the first person you'd tell such a story to. I had so many instances in which I would have greatly preferred people not use the "I hit ___" or "___ hit me"

"I was on my way to work and this guy just hit me! He just came out of nowhere and hit me!"

Cue the inevitable asking of a) did he strike you with a fist? a weapon? b) did he strike you with a vehicle? c) if he struck you with a vehicle, were you in your vehicle or were you walking?

I got burned -many- times over taking the seemingly obvious interpretation of "I was on my way to work and this guy just hit me!" and assuming a "two-vehicle traffic collision" just to find out the caller was actually exiting a coffee shop when someone physically assaulted him, or was walking back to his parked car when he watched someone back into it, etc..

Even "I was driving to work and someone hit me" leaves such a plethora of questions unanswered that yes, in instances where -clarity- is important (having to be clear and succinct, not casually retelling the story at a bar) I would much rather hear "I was driving my vehicle when another driver collided with me" which isn't meaningfully longer and clarifies many questions about what happened.

Zigurd• 5 years ago

If I hit you with a wrench, saying "the wrench hit you" is clearly awkward and obscuring what matters.

MauranKilom3• 5 years ago

I don't see the analogy. "I hit you with a wrench" by and large implies intent. A pedestrian being hit by a car is very rarely an intentional event.

Further, you tend to have control over the wrench in this scenario (and if I was hit by a wrench because you e.g. dropped it unintentionally, "the wrench hit me" is reasonable), whereas insufficient control over the car is usually the problem in a crash.

lkbm• 5 years ago

- 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.

Or alternatively, they got in an argument and the driver punched the pedestrian.

On the other hand, you'd never say "the bicycle hit the pedestrian". It would be "the cyclist hit the pedestrian". The former would make it sound like the cyclist had ejected from the bike and the bicycle to continue onward and collided with the pedestrian.

Part of this may be that when a bicycle crashes into me, the 20LBs of bicycle is less important than the 150LBs of cyclist, whereas with a car it's the momentum of the vehicle that's deadly, but I suspect there's also just the fact that we've normalized absolving drivers and blaming the car itself.

Obviously, the correct solution is to say "the human-operated car crashed into the pedestrian", just as we'd say "the self-driving car" if it were autonomous.

FabHK3• 5 years 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.

lonelyasacloud• 5 years ago

the driver hit the pedestrian

Seems reasonable. Cars don't kill people of their own volition without a driver. And in similar circumstances we wouldn't say something like an AR-15 killed a person, we'd say a gunman/gunwoman/shooter did. Why should drivers get treated differently?

xraystyle• 5 years 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-distrus...

UncleEntity• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

kazinator2• 5 years 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.

chiefofgxbxl9• 5 years 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 [2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/counterf... [3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/counterfactuals/

praxulus• 5 years ago

Your counterfactual explanation makes sense in the helmet example, but I think most people wouldn't be able to figure out that connection without such an explanation. Even if it's correct, it's still confusing. For example, I can't figure out what the relevant counterfactual is in the alcohol example.

That's not to say that these are purely value-neutral facts, it still makes sense for them to be called out by this tool. I wish I had a better term for them though, rather than just complaining about the current label.

nextaccountic• 5 years ago

Maybe you should also include in the site this explanation

nzmsv2• 5 years ago

By the same token though, everyone on this discussion is jumping to "we must reduce speeds in cities" without doing any analysis of whether the collision would be survivable at the lower speed they are proposing. They just assume they don't need to because they have the moral high ground.

FabHK3• 5 years ago

I think the term "counterfactual" comes from the implied, well, counterfactual:

- if the cyclist had been wearing a helmet (which they weren't), then they might have survived

- if impairment had been an issue (which it wasn't), then the driver would've been responsible for that

And I guess they're particularly often used for victim blaming:

- if the rape victim hadn't worn revealing clothing, they probably would have been safe

etc.

So, while I agree that the issue is not particularly well presented here, it does seem plausible to me that implied counterfactuals frequently distract from the culpable party (by pointing out all the hypothetical things that the victim "could have done").

speedybird3• 5 years ago

I think a reasonable rule should be to cull any probabilistic statements

Isn't that all statements, if we're being honest bayesians?

beaconstudios2• 5 years 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.

codezero2• 5 years 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/

beaconstudios2• 5 years 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.

dash23• 5 years 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.

ihaveajob3• 5 years 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.

dash23• 5 years ago

Of course if there is evidence that the driver deliberately tried to kill someone, nobody will call it an accident. I would imagine that the vast majority of car deaths are indeed accidental, not murders. This seems to contrast with the situation of gun deaths. No?

dml21354• 5 years 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.

fermigier2• 5 years 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.

chana_masala• 5 years 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

markstos4• 5 years 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.

karaterobot5• 5 years 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.

markstos4• 5 years 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-blamin...

ipsin• 5 years 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.

uDontKnowMe• 5 years ago

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

gault81212• 5 years 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.

chiefofgxbxl9• 5 years 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

[2] https://github.com/msg-systems/coreferee

[3] https://labelstud.io/

gault81212• 5 years 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.corefere...

gSdYMA• 5 years ago

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

csense• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

yodelshady• 5 years 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• 5 years 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'

burnished4• 5 years 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.

throwaway815232• 5 years ago

I'm sort of in that situation now, though not a kid. I biked around all the time as a kid and in college, but for some reason it's a lot scarier when I do it now, even in areas with not so much traffic. So I don't bike any more, and miss out on a lot of exercise. Weirdly, in the old days I never felt like I needed a rear view mirror when biking, but now I always worry about cars coming up behind me without my noticing. I don't know what has changed.

zip12343• 5 years ago

More like 'parents won't let kid ride more than block from their house'.

And so we get stuff like this:

https://www.engadget.com/little-tikes-smart-stationary-bike-...

scelerat• 5 years ago

Yes, I have experienced "blame the victim" as a cyclist as well..

Traveling down a well-lit street at night, lights on my bike front and back, approaching a four-way intersection, green for me, a car turning left across my path stopped its turn mid-intersection, yielding to my right-of-way allowing me to proceed. Meanwhile, the car behind it filled with drunken women goes around the yielding car to turn left... into me, on my bike. I was luckily agile enough to leap clear as my bike went clattering away beneath me. I was unhurt though, obviously, shaken.

The driver of the car that hit me came running over to the sidewalk where I sat down and started yelling at me for riding at night. And for not wearing a helmet. "You could have been killed!" she said. I am not making this up. Then she fled.

Division and Brannan street, SF, about 12 years ago.

wwweston• 5 years ago

It's also possibly for some of the same reasons: baseline expectations coalesce around some predominate experience (shared social experience / shared road experience) that becomes the default, to the point where it becomes difficult to imagine a different experience unless you've shared it, much less validate and address that experience.

I don't currently bike but once upon a time that was how I usually got around Los Angeles and boy was it eye-opening. And yet, as someone who's primarily been a motorist and pedestrian since, sometimes I catch myself forgetting.

Tarrosion2• 5 years 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/

Article: 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?)

chiefofgxbxl9• 5 years 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.

Tarrosion2• 5 years ago

Interesting context, thanks! Cool tool, will be glad to see it get tuned further :)

elfchief• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

I tried it out on 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.

chiefofgxbxl9• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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/

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

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