DebateHouse

A platform where users can host debates on current news and controversial topics.

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Presentation for our project: https://app.pitch.com/app/presentation/ba0e39d4-3828-4f3b-b57b-2218bfb02686/1f85e6ea-feef-4674-808b-edd0bee5c3ce

💡Inspiration

The problem we are trying to address is that people are oblivious of all of the aspects of the events occurring around them. This may be due to fake and biased news as well as social media. Ultimately, misinformation is rapidly spread throughout the public. This has made many negative impacts on society. It has caused divisions to form between groups of people, such as the spike in racism against Asians during the pandemic. A 2018 study observes that false information is more likely to spread than the truth.

We wanted a place where misinformation can be fully,—if not, partially—eradicated. We feel that debates will allow people to view both sides of a topic, not just their side.

💻What it does

DebateHouse provides users with a platform where they read about current affairs in a short summarised way, and if they want to know more, they read the entire article from the publisher. And if you want to present your views regarding that news, you start a discussion on that topic. Users can create and host discussion rooms that others can join. The topic at hand is chosen by the host. Debaters will discuss the topic until the host chooses to end the discussion. Once the host does, a summary of the debate is posted in the debate feed.

🛠️How we built it

We used React to built the front end. The backend is handled by Django and we used Firebase for our database. When a discussion is ended an api is called which will pass the messages to the OpenAI api by which we get to harness the power of Open AI's state of the art model GPT-3. Using that we created the summarisations. Using Django in the backend help us to take care of all the api endpoints and routings.

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🛑Challenges we ran into

We wanted to create a factchecker, but the API used said that every statement was false, so we got rid of it. We used the time we had left to implement other cool features like the news feed. There were difficulties while integrating firebase and Django, we couldn't harness the full potential of firebase using python and we needed to do some works from the frontend.

✅Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made this idea into an application. This itself if a thing that we are super proud off. We included new features like the integration of open news API to start a discussion about a topic right from the news feed and got a chance to play with one of the world's powerful model GPT-3.

📖What we learned

• We learned how to use react js as front-end with django as the back-end

• Implementation of NLP processing using open-AI

• Using firebase we implemented user authentication and used firestore as our data to handle our request regarding the discussions and summarization

• We also learned about the implementation of APIs

• In the end, we all learned to collaborate and work in a team.

📈What's next for DebateHouse

In the future, we plan to do more processing to the data that is given to the API and fine tune the model more accurately to get better summaries. We also plan to integrate a functional fact checker.

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