In this paper we present the ClaimBuster dataset of 23,533 statements extracted from all U.S. general election presidential debates and annotated by human coders. The ClaimBuster dataset can be leveraged in building computational methods to identify claims that are worth fact-checking from the myriad of sources of digital or traditional media. The ClaimBuster dataset is publicly available to the research community, and it can be found at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3609356.
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Taif University（塔伊夫大学）
An important component of an automated fact-checking system is the claim check-worthiness detection system, which ranks sentences by prioritising them based on their need to be checked. Despite a body of research tackling the task, previous research has overlooked the challenging nature of identifying check-worthy claims across different topics. In this paper, we assess and quantify the challenge of detecting check-worthy claims for new, unseen topics. After highlighting the problem, we propose the AraCWA model to mitigate the performance deterioration when detecting check-worthy claims across…
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”（索非亚大学“圣克里门特·奥赫里德斯基”）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
In the context of investigative journalism, we address the problem of automatically identifying which claims in a given document are most worthy and should be prioritized for fact-checking. Despite its importance, this is a relatively understudied problem. Thus, we create a new dataset of political debates, containing statements that have been fact-checked by nine reputable sources, and we train machine learning models to predict which claims should be prioritized for fact-checking, i.e., we model the problem as a ranking task. Unlike previous work, which has looked primarily at sentences in i…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar（卡塔尔计算研究所（HBKU））；Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria（索非亚大学“圣克莱门特·奥赫里德斯基”）；Amazon, Barcelona, Spain（亚马逊（巴塞罗那））
We present ClaimRank, an online system for detecting check-worthy claims. While originally trained on political debates, the system can work for any kind of text, e.g., interviews or regular news articles. Its aim is to facilitate manual fact-checking efforts by prioritizing the claims that fact-checkers should consider first. ClaimRank supports both Arabic and English, it is trained on actual annotations from nine reputable fact-checking organizations (PolitiFact, FactCheck, ABC, CNN, NPR, NYT, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and Washington Post), and thus it can mimic the claim selection stra…
The widespread diffusion of medical and political claims in the wake of COVID-19 has led to a voluminous rise in misinformation and fake news. The current vogue is to employ manual fact-checkers to efficiently classify and verify such data to combat this avalanche of claim-ridden misinformation. However, the rate of information dissemination is such that it vastly outpaces the fact-checkers' strength. Therefore, to aid manual fact-checkers in eliminating the superfluous content, it becomes imperative to automatically identify and extract the snippets of claim-worthy (mis)information present in…
Plano West Senior High School（普莱诺西部高中）；The University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）
We present a study on the efficacy of adversarial training on transformer neural network models, with respect to the task of detecting check-worthy claims. In this work, we introduce the first adversarially-regularized, transformer-based claim spotter model that achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple challenging benchmarks. We obtain a 4.70 point F1-score improvement over current state-of-the-art models on the ClaimBuster Dataset and CLEF2019 Dataset, respectively. In the process, we propose a method to apply adversarial training to transformer models, which has the potential to be gene…
We propose a novel, attention-based self-supervised approach to identify "claim-worthy" sentences in a fake news article, an important first step in automated fact-checking. We leverage "aboutness" of headline and content using attention mechanism for this task. The identified claims can be used for downstream task of claim verification for which we are releasing a benchmark dataset of manually selected compelling articles with veracity labels and associated evidence. This work goes beyond stylistic analysis to identifying content that influences reader belief. Experiments with three datasets …
Identifying check-worthy claims is often the first step of automated fact-checking systems. Tackling this task in a multilingual setting has been understudied. Encoding inputs with multilingual text representations could be one approach to solve the multilingual check-worthiness detection. However, this approach could suffer if cultural bias exists within the communities on determining what is check-worthy.In this paper, we propose a language identification task as an auxiliary task to mitigate unintended bias.With this purpose, we experiment joint training by using the datasets from CLEF-2021…
Ontology Learning (OL) is the computational task of generating a knowledge base in the form of an ontology given an unstructured corpus whose content is in natural language (NL). Several works can be found in this area most of which are limited to statistical and lexico-syntactic pattern matching based techniques Light-Weight OL. These techniques do not lead to very accurate learning mostly because of several linguistic nuances in NL. Formal OL is an alternative (less explored) methodology were deep linguistics analysis is made using theory and tools found in computational linguistics to gener…
PRHLT Research Center, Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学PRHLT研究中心）；DW Innovation（德国之声创新部）；University of Marburg（马尔堡大学）
Check-worthiness detection is the task of identifying claims, worthy to be investigated by fact-checkers. Resource scarcity for non-world languages and model learning costs remain major challenges for the creation of models supporting multilingual check-worthiness detection. This paper proposes cross-training adapters on a subset of world languages, combined by adapter fusion, to detect claims emerging globally in multiple languages. (1) With a vast number of annotators available for world languages and the storage-efficient adapter models, this approach is more cost efficient. Models can be u…
While recent work on automated fact-checking has focused mainly on verifying and explaining claims, for which the list of claims is readily available, identifying check-worthy claim sentences from a text remains challenging. Current claim identification models rely on manual annotations for each sentence in the text, which is an expensive task and challenging to conduct on a frequent basis across multiple domains. This paper explores methodology to identify check-worthy claim sentences from fake news articles, irrespective of domain, without explicit sentence-level annotations. We leverage two…
We study the problem of automatic fact-checking, paying special attention to the impact of contextual and discourse information. We address two related tasks: (i) detecting check-worthy claims, and (ii) fact-checking claims. We develop supervised systems based on neural networks, kernel-based support vector machines, and combinations thereof, which make use of rich input representations in terms of discourse cues and contextual features. For the check-worthiness estimation task, we focus on political debates, and we model the target claim in the context of the full intervention of a participan…
We contribute the largest publicly available dataset of naturally occurring factual claims for the purpose of automatic claim verification. It is collected from 26 fact checking websites in English, paired with textual sources and rich metadata, and labelled for veracity by human expert journalists. We present an in-depth analysis of the dataset, highlighting characteristics and challenges. Further, we present results for automatic veracity prediction, both with established baselines and with a novel method for joint ranking of evidence pages and predicting veracity that outperforms all baseli…
Misinformation spread over social media has become an undeniable infodemic. However, not all spreading claims are made equal. If propagated, some claims can be destructive, not only on the individual level, but to organizations and even countries. Detecting claims that should be prioritized for fact-checking is considered the first step to fight against spread of fake news. With training data limited to a handful of languages, developing supervised models to tackle the problem over lower-resource languages is currently infeasible. Therefore, our work aims to investigate whether we can use exis…
Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；Izmir Institute of Technology（伊兹密尔理工学院）；bytes Corp.（2bytes公司）；University of Koblenz-Landau（科布伦茨-兰道大学）
Widespread and rapid dissemination of false news has made fact-checking an indispensable requirement. Given its time-consuming and labor-intensive nature, the task calls for an automated support to meet the demand. In this paper, we propose to leverage commonsense knowledge for the tasks of false news classification and check-worthy claim detection. Arguing that commonsense knowledge is a factor in human believability, we fine-tune the BERT language model with a commonsense question answering task and the aforementioned tasks in a multi-task learning environment. For predicting fine-grained fa…
Computer Science and Engineering Department, Qatar University（卡塔尔大学计算机科学与工程系）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；DIT, Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学DIT（此处DIT按原文保留，若需全称需更多上下文））；Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学计算机科学系）
We present an overview of the second edition of the CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2019. The lab featured two tasks in two different languages: English and Arabic. Task 1 (English) challenged the participating systems to predict which claims in a political debate or speech should be prioritized for fact-checking. Task 2 (Arabic) asked to (A) rank a given set of Web pages with respect to a check-worthy claim based on their usefulness for fact-checking that claim, (B) classify these same Web pages according to their degree of usefulness for fact-checking the target claim, (C) identify useful passages fr…
Qatar Computing Research Institute HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所（HBKU））；University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；DIT Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学DIT学院）；Newtral Media Audiovisual；Sofia University（索非亚大学）；University of Duisburg-Essen（杜伊斯堡-埃森大学）；University of Applied Sciences Potsdam（波茨坦应用科学大学）；University of Hildesheim（希尔德斯海姆大学）；TOBB University of Economics and Technology（托普卡帕经济与技术大学）
We describe the fourth edition of the CheckThat! Lab, part of the 2021 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The lab evaluates technology supporting tasks related to factuality, and covers Arabic, Bulgarian, English, Spanish, and Turkish. Task 1 asks to predict which posts in a Twitter stream are worth fact-checking, focusing on COVID-19 and politics (in all five languages). Task 2 asks to determine whether a claim in a tweet can be verified using a set of previously fact-checked claims (in Arabic and English). Task 3 asks to predict the veracity of a news article and its topical…
TOBB University of Economics and Technology（TOBB经济与技术大学）
The massive amount of misinformation spreading on the Internet on a daily basis has enormous negative impacts on societies. Therefore, we need automated systems helping fact-checkers in the combat against misinformation. In this paper, we propose a model prioritizing the claims based on their check-worthiness. We use BERT model with additional features including domain-specific controversial topics, word embeddings, and others. In our experiments, we show that our proposed model outperforms all state-of-the-art models in both test collections of CLEF Check That! Lab in 2018 and 2019. We also c…
As the first step of automatic fact checking, claim check-worthiness detection is a critical component of fact checking systems. There are multiple lines of research which study this problem: check-worthiness ranking from political speeches and debates, rumour detection on Twitter, and citation needed detection from Wikipedia. To date, there has been no structured comparison of these various tasks to understand their relatedness, and no investigation into whether or not a unified approach to all of them is achievable. In this work, we illuminate a central challenge in claim check-worthiness de…
Given a possibly false claim sentence, how can we automatically correct it with minimal editing? Existing methods either require a large number of pairs of false and corrected claims for supervised training or do not handle well errors spanning over multiple tokens within an utterance. In this paper, we propose VENCE, a novel method for factual error correction (FEC) with minimal edits. VENCE formulates the FEC problem as iterative sampling editing actions with respect to a target density function. We carefully design the target function with predicted truthfulness scores from an offline train…
Automatic fact-checking systems detect misinformation, such as fake news, by (i) selecting check-worthy sentences for fact-checking, (ii) gathering related information to the sentences, and (iii) inferring the factuality of the sentences. Most prior research on (i) uses hand-crafted features to select check-worthy sentences, and does not explicitly account for the recent finding that the top weighted terms in both check-worthy and non-check-worthy sentences are actually overlapping [15]. Motivated by this, we present a neural check-worthiness sentence ranking model that represents each word in…
This paper introduces the task of factual error correction: performing edits to a claim so that the generated rewrite is better supported by evidence. This extends the well-studied task of fact verification by providing a mechanism to correct written texts that are refuted or only partially supported by evidence. We demonstrate that it is feasible to train factual error correction systems from existing fact checking datasets which only contain labeled claims accompanied by evidence, but not the correction. We achieve this by employing a two-stage distant supervision approach that incorporates …
This paper introduces the task of factual error correction: performing edits to a claim so that the generated rewrite is better supported by evidence. This extends the well-studied task of fact verification by providing a mechanism to correct written texts that are refuted or only partially supported by evidence. We demonstrate that it is feasible to train factual error correction systems from existing fact checking datasets which only contain labeled claims accompanied by evidence, but not the correction. We achieve this by employing a two-stage distant supervision approach that incorporates …
Towards Comprehensive Stage-wise Benchmarking of Large Language Models in Fact-Checking
Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University（香港 Baptist 大学计算机科学系）；Salesforce AI Research（Salesforce AI 研究院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科学与技术大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The Education University of Hong Kong（香港教育大学）
Claim-Level Confidence Calibration for Reliable Decision Making with Large Language Models
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Vulcan Research（伏尔坎研究院）；AIFT；Keio Global Research Institute (KGRI)（庆应全球研究所（KGRI））；China Mobile Research Institute（中国移动研究院）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）
Sofia University “St Kliment Ohridski”（索非亚大学“圣克里门特·奥赫里德斯基”）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
While misinformation and disinformation have been thriving in social media for years, with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the political and the health misinformation merged, thus elevating the problem to a whole new level and giving rise to the first global infodemic. The fight against this infodemic has many aspects, with fact-checking and debunking false and misleading claims being among the most important ones. Unfortunately, manual fact-checking is time-consuming and automatic fact-checking is resource-intense, which means that we need to pre-filter the input social media posts an…
Factcheck-Bench: Fine-Grained Evaluation Benchmark for Automatic Fact-checkers
MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）
