Fact checking at scale is difficult -- while the number of active fact checking websites is growing, it remains too small for the needs of the contemporary media ecosystem. However, despite good intentions, contributions from volunteers are often error-prone, and thus in practice restricted to claim detection. We investigate how to increase the accuracy and efficiency of fact checking by providing information about the claim before performing the check, in the form of natural language briefs. We investigate passage-based briefs, containing a relevant passage from Wikipedia, entity-centric ones consisting of Wikipedia pages of mentioned entities, and Question-Answering Briefs, with questions decomposing the claim, and their answers. To produce QABriefs, we develop QABriefer, a model that generates a set of questions conditioned on the claim, searches the web for evidence, and generates answers. To train its components, we introduce QABriefDataset which we collected via crowdsourcing. We show that fact checking with briefs -- in particular QABriefs -- increases the accuracy of crowdworkers by 10% while slightly decreasing the time taken. For volunteer (unpaid) fact checkers, QABriefs slightly increase accuracy and reduce the time required by around 20%.
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica（中央研究院信息科学研究所）；National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Institute of Information, Academia Sinica（中央研究院资讯研究所）
Automated fact checking systems have been proposed that quickly provide veracity prediction at scale to mitigate the negative influence of fake news on people and on public opinion. However, most studies focus on veracity classifiers of those systems, which merely predict the truthfulness of news articles. We posit that effective fact checking also relies on people's understanding of the predictions. In this paper, we propose elucidating fact checking predictions using counterfactual explanations to help people understand why a specific piece of news was identified as fake. In this work, gener…
Fact-checking requires retrieving evidence related to a claim under investigation. The task can be formulated as question generation based on a claim, followed by question answering. However, recent question generation approaches assume that the answer is known and typically contained in a passage given as input, whereas such passages are what is being sought when verifying a claim. In this paper, we present {\it Varifocal}, a method that generates questions based on different focal points within a given claim, i.e.\ different spans of the claim and its metadata, such as its source and date. O…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Automated scientific fact checking is difficult due to the complexity of scientific language and a lack of significant amounts of training data, as annotation requires domain expertise. To address this challenge, we propose scientific claim generation, the task of generating one or more atomic and verifiable claims from scientific sentences, and demonstrate its usefulness in zero-shot fact checking for biomedical claims. We propose CLAIMGEN-BART, a new supervised method for generating claims supported by the literature, as well as KBIN, a novel method for generating claim negations. Additional…
Automatic News Generation and Fact-Checking System Based on Language Processing
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；University of California（加利福尼亚大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
School of Computing and Information Systems（计算与信息系统学院）；The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）
There is unison is the scientific community about human induced climate change. Despite this, we see the web awash with claims around climate change scepticism, thus driving the need for fact checking them but at the same time providing an explanation and justification for the fact check. Scientists and experts have been trying to address it by providing manually written feedback for these claims. In this paper, we try to aid them by automating generating explanation for a predicted veracity label for a claim by deploying the approach used in open domain question answering of a fusion in decod…
University of Stavanger（斯塔万格大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息研究所）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）
We present SUMO, a neural attention-based approach that learns to establish the correctness of textual claims based on evidence in the form of text documents (e.g., news articles or Web documents). SUMO further generates an extractive summary by presenting a diversified set of sentences from the documents that explain its decision on the correctness of the textual claim. Prior approaches to address the problem of fact checking and evidence extraction have relied on simple concatenation of claim and document word embeddings as an input to claim driven attention weight computation. This is done …
Most existing work on automated fact checking is concerned with predicting the veracity of claims based on metadata, social network spread, language used in claims, and, more recently, evidence supporting or denying claims. A crucial piece of the puzzle that is still missing is to understand how to automate the most elaborate part of the process -- generating justifications for verdicts on claims. This paper provides the first study of how these explanations can be generated automatically based on available claim context, and how this task can be modelled jointly with veracity prediction. Our …
TU Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）；DFKI GmbH（德国人工智能研究中心）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
Fact-checking systems have become important tools to verify fake and misguiding news. These systems become more trustworthy when human-readable explanations accompany the veracity labels. However, manual collection of such explanations is expensive and time-consuming. Recent works frame explanation generation as extractive summarization, and propose to automatically select a sufficient subset of the most important facts from the ruling comments (RCs) of a professional journalist to obtain fact-checking explanations. However, these explanations lack fluency and sentence coherence. In this work,…
A number of exciting advances have been made in automated fact-checking thanks to increasingly larger datasets and more powerful systems, leading to improvements in the complexity of claims which can be accurately fact-checked. However, despite these advances, there are still desirable functionalities missing from the fact-checking pipeline. In this survey, we focus on the explanation functionality -- that is fact-checking systems providing reasons for their predictions. We summarize existing methods for explaining the predictions of fact-checking systems and we explore trends in this topic. F…
Adversarial attacks reveal important vulnerabilities and flaws of trained models. One potent type of attack are universal adversarial triggers, which are individual n-grams that, when appended to instances of a class under attack, can trick a model into predicting a target class. However, for inference tasks such as fact checking, these triggers often inadvertently invert the meaning of instances they are inserted in. In addition, such attacks produce semantically nonsensical inputs, as they simply concatenate triggers to existing samples. Here, we investigate how to generate adversarial attac…
Saarland University（萨尔兰大学）；University of the Basque Country（巴斯克大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarland Informatics Campus（德国人工智能研究中心，萨尔兰信息学校区）；Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology（信息技术学院，布拉格技术大学）；Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies（Kempelen智能技术研究所）
Verifying complex political claims is a challenging task, especially when politicians use various tactics to subtly misrepresent the facts. Automatic fact-checking systems fall short here, and their predictions like "half-true" are not very useful in isolation, since we have no idea which parts of the claim are true and which are not. In this work, we focus on decomposing a complex claim into a comprehensive set of yes-no subquestions whose answers influence the veracity of the claim. We present ClaimDecomp, a dataset of decompositions for over 1000 claims. Given a claim and its verification p…
CANDY: Benchmarking LLMs' Limitations and Assistive Potential in Chinese Misinformation Fact-Checking
School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, China（四川大学网络科学与工程学院）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, China（四川大学计算机学院）；Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore（新加坡国立大学数据科学研究所）
Hybrid Fact-Checking that Integrates Knowledge Graphs, Large Language Models, and Search-Based Retrieval Agents Improves Interpretable Claim Verification
