Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userThe Role of Context in Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims
76
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Preslav Nakov
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Recent years have seen the proliferation of disinformation and misinformation online, thanks to the freedom of expression on the Internet and to the rise of social media. Two solutions were proposed to address the problem: (i) manual fact-checking, which is accurate and credible, but slow and non-scalable, and (ii) automatic fact-checking, which is fast and scalable, but lacks explainability and credibility. With the accumulation of enough manually fact-checked claims, a middle-ground approach has emerged: checking whether a given claim has previously been fact-checked. This can be made automatically, and thus fast, while also offering credibility and explainability, thanks to the human fact-checking and explanations in the associated fact-checking article. This is a relatively new and understudied research direction, and here we focus on claims made in a political debate, where context really matters. Thus, we study the impact of modeling the context of the claim: both on the source side, i.e., in the debate, as well as on the target side, i.e., in the fact-checking explanation document. We do this by modeling the local context, the global context, as well as by means of co-reference resolution, and reasoning over the target text using Transformer-XH. The experimental results show that each of these represents a valuable information source, but that modeling the source-side context is more important, and can yield 10+ points of absolute improvement.
rate research
Read More
The rise of Internet has made it a major source of information. Unfortunately, not all information online is true, and thus a number of fact-checking initiatives have been launched, both manual and automatic. Here, we present our contribution in this regard: WhatTheWikiFact, a system for automatic claim verification using Wikipedia. The system predicts the veracity of an input claim, and it further shows the evidence it has retrieved as part of the verification process. It shows confidence scores and a list of relevant Wikipedia articles, together with detailed information about each article, including the phrase used to retrieve it, the most relevant sentences it contains, and their stances with respect to the input claim, with associated probabilities.
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 so as to extract salient words and sentences from the documents that help establish the correctness of the claim. However, this design of claim-driven attention does not capture the contextual information in documents properly. We improve on the prior art by using improved claim and title guided hierarchical attention to model effective contextual cues. We show the efficacy of our approach on datasets concerning political, healthcare, and environmental issues.
We introduce a FEVER-like dataset COVID-Fact of $4,086$ claims concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. The dataset contains claims, evidence for the claims, and contradictory claims refuted by the evidence. Unlike previous approaches, we automatically detect true claims and their source articles and then generate counter-claims using automatic methods rather than employing human annotators. Along with our constructed resource, we formally present the task of identifying relevant evidence for the claims and verifying whether the evidence refutes or supports a given claim. In addition to scientific claims, our data contains simplified general claims from media sources, making it better suited for detecting general misinformation regarding COVID-19. Our experiments indicate that COVID-Fact will provide a challenging testbed for the development of new systems and our approach will reduce the costs of building domain-specific datasets for detecting misinformation.
When engaging in argumentative discourse, skilled human debaters tailor claims to the beliefs of the audience, to construct effective arguments. Recently, the field of computational argumentation witnessed extensive effort to address the automatic generation of arguments. However, existing approaches do not perform any audience-specific adaptation. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by studying the task of belief-based claim generation: Given a controversial topic and a set of beliefs, generate an argumentative claim tailored to the beliefs. To tackle this task, we model the peoples prior beliefs through their stances on controversial topics and extend state-of-the-art text generation models to generate claims conditioned on the beliefs. Our automatic evaluation confirms the ability of our approach to adapt claims to a set of given beliefs. In a manual study, we additionally evaluate the generated claims in terms of informativeness and their likelihood to be uttered by someone with a respective belief. Our results reveal the limitations of modeling users beliefs based on their stances, but demonstrate the potential of encoding beliefs into argumentative texts, laying the ground for future exploration of audience reach.
Logical reasoning, which is closely related to human cognition, is of vital importance in humans understanding of texts. Recent years have witnessed increasing attentions on machines logical reasoning abilities. However, previous studies commonly apply ad-hoc methods to model pre-defined relation patterns, such as linking named entities, which only considers global knowledge components that are related to commonsense, without local perception of complete facts or events. Such methodology is obviously insufficient to deal with complicated logical structures. Therefore, we argue that the natural logic units would be the group of backbone constituents of the sentence such as the subject-verb-object formed facts, covering both global and local knowledge pieces that are necessary as the basis for logical reasoning. Beyond building the ad-hoc graphs, we propose a more general and convenient fact-driven approach to construct a supergraph on top of our newly defined fact units, and enhance the supergraph with further explicit guidance of local question and option interactions. Experiments on two challenging logical reasoning benchmark datasets, ReClor and LogiQA, show that our proposed model, textsc{Focal Reasoner}, outperforms the baseline models dramatically. It can also be smoothly applied to other downstream tasks such as MuTual, a dialogue reasoning dataset, achieving competitive results.
suggested questions
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
