CrowdChecked: Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims in Social Media
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”（圣基里尔·奥赫里德斯基索菲亚大学）；HSE University（高等经济大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Momchil Hardalov, Anton Chernyavskiy, Ivan Koychev, Dmitry Ilvovsky, Preslav Nakov
While there has been substantial progress in developing systems to automate fact-checking, they still lack credibility in the eyes of the users. Thus, an interesting approach has emerged: to perform automatic fact-checking by verifying whether an input claim has been previously fact-checked by professional fact-checkers and to return back an article that explains their decision. This is a sensible approach as people trust manual fact-checking, and as many claims are repeated multiple times. Yet, a major issue when building such systems is the small number of known tweet--verifying article pairs available for training. Here, we aim to bridge this gap by making use of crowd fact-checking, i.e., mining claims in social media for which users have responded with a link to a fact-checking article. In particular, we mine a large-scale collection of 330,000 tweets paired with a corresponding fact-checking article. We further propose an end-to-end framework to learn from this noisy data based on modified self-adaptive training, in a distant supervision scenario. Our experiments on the CLEF'21 CheckThat! test set show improvements over the state of the art by two points absolute. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/mhardalov/crowdchecked-claims
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；Sofia University（索非亚大学）
The recent proliferation of "fake news" has triggered a number of responses, most notably the emergence of several manual fact-checking initiatives. As a result and over time, a large number of fact-checked claims have been accumulated, which increases the likelihood that a new claim in social media or a new statement by a politician might have already been fact-checked by some trusted fact-checking organization, as viral claims often come back after a while in social media, and politicians like to repeat their favorite statements, true or false, over and over again. As manual fact-checking is…
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…
Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies（凯普伦智能技术研究所）；Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学信息技术学院）
False information has a significant negative influence on individuals as well as on the whole society. Especially in the current COVID-19 era, we witness an unprecedented growth of medical misinformation. To help tackle this problem with machine learning approaches, we are publishing a feature-rich dataset of approx. 317k medical news articles/blogs and 3.5k fact-checked claims. It also contains 573 manually and more than 51k automatically labelled mappings between claims and articles. Mappings consist of claim presence, i.e., whether a claim is contained in a given article, and article stance…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Key Lab of Data Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学数据工程与知识工程重点实验室）
False claims that have been previously fact-checked can still spread on social media. To mitigate their continual spread, detecting previously fact-checked claims is indispensable. Given a claim, existing works focus on providing evidence for detection by reranking candidate fact-checking articles (FC-articles) retrieved by BM25. However, these performances may be limited because they ignore the following characteristics of FC-articles: (1) claims are often quoted to describe the checked events, providing lexical information besides semantics; (2) sentence templates to introduce or debunk clai…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）
Recent years have seen the proliferation of disinformation and fake news online. Traditional approaches to mitigate these issues is to use manual or automatic fact-checking. Recently, another approach has emerged: checking whether the input claim has previously been fact-checked, which can be done automatically, and thus fast, while also offering credibility and explainability, thanks to the human fact-checking and explanations in the associated fact-checking article. Here, we focus on claims made in a political debate and we study the impact of modeling the context of the claim: both on the s…
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Sofia University（索非亚大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Given the recent proliferation of false claims online, there has been a lot of manual fact-checking effort. As this is very time-consuming, human fact-checkers can benefit from tools that can support them and make them more efficient. Here, we focus on building a system that could provide such support. Given an input document, it aims to detect all sentences that contain a claim that can be verified by some previously fact-checked claims (from a given database). The output is a re-ranked list of the document sentences, so that those that can be verified are ranked as high as possible, together…
Large Language Models for Multilingual Previously Fact-Checked Claim Detection
Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology（布拉格技术大学信息学院）；Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies（智能技术研究所）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；Centre for European Research in Trusted AI (CERTAIN)（可信人工智能欧洲研究中心）
SemEval-2025 Task 7: Multilingual and Crosslingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies（Kempelen智能技术研究所）；German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究 institute）
IIT Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）；Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI（萨里以人为本人工智能研究所）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Social media platforms have become new battlegrounds for anti-social elements, with misinformation being the weapon of choice. Fact-checking organizations try to debunk as many claims as possible while staying true to their journalistic processes but cannot cope with its rapid dissemination. We believe that the solution lies in partial automation of the fact-checking life cycle, saving human time for tasks which require high cognition. We propose a new workflow for efficiently detecting previously fact-checked claims that uses abstractive summarization to generate crisp queries. These queries …
UWBa at SemEval-2025 Task 7: Multilingual and Crosslingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen（西波希米亚大学信息科学与工程系）；New Technologies for the Information Society, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen（西波希米亚大学信息社会新技术研究所）
Misinformation is becoming increasingly prevalent on social media and in news articles. It has become so widespread that we require algorithmic assistance utilising machine learning to detect such content. Training these machine learning models require datasets of sufficient scale, diversity and quality. However, datasets in the field of automatic misinformation detection are predominantly monolingual, include a limited amount of modalities and are not of sufficient scale and quality. Addressing this, we develop a data collection and linking system (MuMiN-trawl), to build a public misinformati…
Lost in translation: using global fact-checks to measure multilingual misinformation prevalence, spread, and evolution
Department of Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning, University of Zurich, Switzerland（苏黎世大学数学建模与机器学习系）；Digital Society Initiative, University of Zurich, Switzerland（苏黎世大学数字社会倡议）；Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, United Kingdom（牛津大学网络研究所）；Meedan, San Francisco, United States（梅丹公司，旧金山，美国）
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…
Recent work has proposed multi-hop models and datasets for studying complex natural language reasoning. One notable task requiring multi-hop reasoning is fact checking, where a set of connected evidence pieces leads to the final verdict of a claim. However, existing datasets either do not provide annotations for gold evidence pages, or the only dataset which does (FEVER) mostly consists of claims which can be fact-checked with simple reasoning and is constructed artificially. Here, we study more complex claim verification of naturally occurring claims with multiple hops over interconnected evi…
Sofia University（索非亚大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
The recent explosion of false claims in social media and on the Web in general has given rise to a lot of manual fact-checking initiatives. Unfortunately, the number of claims that need to be fact-checked is several orders of magnitude larger than what humans can handle manually. Thus, there has been a lot of research aiming at automating the process. Interestingly, previous work has largely ignored the growing number of claims about images. This is despite the fact that visual imagery is more influential than text and naturally appears alongside fake news. Here we aim at bridging this gap. In…
DIT–Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学数字与信息工程系）；Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
We describe the third edition of the CheckThat! Lab, which is part of the 2020 Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). CheckThat! proposes four complementary tasks and a related task from previous lab editions, offered in English, Arabic, and Spanish. Task 1 asks to predict which tweets in a Twitter stream are worth fact-checking. Task 2 asks to determine whether a claim posted in a tweet can be verified using a set of previously fact-checked claims. Task 3 asks to retrieve text snippets from a given set of Web pages that would be useful for verifying a target tweet's claim. Task 4 asks to pre…
Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所（哈马德·本·哈利法大学））；Sofia University “St Kliment Ohridski”（索菲亚大学“圣克莱门特·奥赫里德斯基”）
We present an overview of the third edition of the CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2020. The lab featured five tasks in two different languages: English and Arabic. The first four tasks compose the full pipeline of claim verification in social media: Task 1 on check-worthiness estimation, Task 2 on retrieving previously fact-checked claims, Task 3 on evidence retrieval, and Task 4 on claim verification. The lab is completed with Task 5 on check-worthiness estimation in political debates and speeches. A total of 67 teams registered to participate in the lab (up from 47 at CLEF 2019), and 23 of them actu…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
Given the recent proliferation of disinformation online, there has been also growing research interest in automatically debunking rumors, false claims, and "fake news." A number of fact-checking initiatives have been launched so far, both manual and automatic, but the whole enterprise remains in a state of crisis: by the time a claim is finally fact-checked, it could have reached millions of users, and the harm caused could hardly be undone. An arguably more promising direction is to focus on fact-checking entire news outlets, which can be done in advance. Then, we could fact-check the news be…
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…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Meedan（米丹）；MIT（麻省理工学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Manual fact-checking does not scale well to serve the needs of the internet. This issue is further compounded in non-English contexts. In this paper, we discuss claim matching as a possible solution to scale fact-checking. We define claim matching as the task of identifying pairs of textual messages containing claims that can be served with one fact-check. We construct a novel dataset of WhatsApp tipline and public group messages alongside fact-checked claims that are first annotated for containing "claim-like statements" and then matched with potentially similar items and annotated for claim …
This paper discusses the approach used by the Accenture Team for CLEF2021 CheckThat! Lab, Task 1, to identify whether a claim made in social media would be interesting to a wide audience and should be fact-checked. Twitter training and test data were provided in English, Arabic, Spanish, Turkish, and Bulgarian. Claims were to be classified (check-worthy/not check-worthy) and ranked in priority order for the fact-checker. Our method used deep neural network transformer models with contextually sensitive lexical augmentation applied on the supplied training datasets to create additional training…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；Full Fact（Full Fact事实核查机构）；Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；EURECOM（欧洲通信学院）；University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）
The reporting and the analysis of current events around the globe has expanded from professional, editor-lead journalism all the way to citizen journalism. Nowadays, politicians and other key players enjoy direct access to their audiences through social media, bypassing the filters of official cables or traditional media. However, the multiple advantages of free speech and direct communication are dimmed by the misuse of media to spread inaccurate or misleading claims. These phenomena have led to the modern incarnation of the fact-checker -- a professional whose main aim is to examine claims u…
We introduce the strategies used by the Accenture Team for the CLEF2020 CheckThat! Lab, Task 1, on English and Arabic. This shared task evaluated whether a claim in social media text should be professionally fact checked. To a journalist, a statement presented as fact, which would be of interest to a large audience, requires professional fact-checking before dissemination. We utilized BERT and RoBERTa models to identify claims in social media text a professional fact-checker should review, and rank these in priority order for the fact-checker. For the English challenge, we fine-tuned a RoBERTa…
Jilin University（吉林大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）
Existing fake news detection methods aim to classify a piece of news as true or false and provide veracity explanations, achieving remarkable performances. However, they often tailor automated solutions on manual fact-checked reports, suffering from limited news coverage and debunking delays. When a piece of news has not yet been fact-checked or debunked, certain amounts of relevant raw reports are usually disseminated on various media outlets, containing the wisdom of crowds to verify the news claim and explain its verdict. In this paper, we propose a novel Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Di…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Stanford Law School（斯坦福法学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
An important challenge for news fact-checking is the effective dissemination of existing fact-checks. This in turn brings the need for reliable methods to detect previously fact-checked claims. In this paper, we focus on automatically finding existing fact-checks for claims made in social media posts (tweets). We conduct both classification and retrieval experiments, in monolingual (English only), multilingual (Spanish, Portuguese), and cross-lingual (Hindi-English) settings using multilingual transformer models such as XLM-RoBERTa and multilingual embeddings such as LaBSE and SBERT. We presen…
Universidad Politecnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学）；Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid（马德里胡安·卡洛斯国王大学）
Our society produces and shares overwhelming amounts of information through Online Social Networks (OSNs). Within this environment, misinformation and disinformation have proliferated, becoming a public safety concern in most countries. Allowing the public and professionals to efficiently find reliable evidences about the factual veracity of a claim is a crucial step to mitigate this harmful spread. To this end, we propose FacTeR-Check, a multilingual architecture for semi-automated fact-checking that can be used for either applications designed for the general public and by fact-checking orga…
Checkstep Research（Checkstep研究院）；Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”（圣基里尔·奥赫里德斯基索非亚大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
Understanding attitudes expressed in texts, also known as stance detection, plays an important role in systems for detecting false information online, be it misinformation (unintentionally false) or disinformation (intentionally false information). Stance detection has been framed in different ways, including (a) as a component of fact-checking, rumour detection, and detecting previously fact-checked claims, or (b) as a task in its own right. While there have been prior efforts to contrast stance detection with other related tasks such as argumentation mining and sentiment analysis, there is n…
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…
