Assisting the Human Fact-Checkers: Detecting All Previously Fact-Checked Claims in a Document

Shaden Shaar, Nikola Georgiev, Firoj Alam, Giovanni Da San Martino, Aisha Mohamed, Preslav Nakov

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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 with corresponding evidence. Unlike previous work, which has looked into claim retrieval, here we take a document-level perspective. We create a new manually annotated dataset for this task, and we propose suitable evaluation measures. We further experiment with a learning-to-rank approach, achieving sizable performance gains over several strong baselines. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of modeling text similarity and stance, while also taking into account the veracity of the retrieved previously fact-checked claims. We believe that this research would be of interest to fact-checkers, journalists, media, and regulatory authorities.

Original languageEnglish
Pages2069-2080
Number of pages12
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event2022 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 - Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Duration: 7 Dec 202211 Dec 2022

Conference

Conference2022 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited Arab Emirates
CityAbu Dhabi
Period7/12/2211/12/22

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Assisting the Human Fact-Checkers: Detecting All Previously Fact-Checked Claims in a Document'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this