Overview of CheckThat! 2020: Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims in Social Media

Alberto Barrón-Cedeño*, Tamer Elsayed, Preslav Nakov, Giovanni Da San Martino, Maram Hasanain, Reem Suwaileh, Fatima Haouari, Nikolay Babulkov, Bayan Hamdan, Alex Nikolov, Shaden Shaar, Zien Sheikh Ali

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

72 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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 actually submitted runs (compared to 14 at CLEF 2019). Most teams used deep neural networks based on BERT, LSTMs, or CNNs, and achieved sizable improvements over the baselines on all tasks. Here we describe the tasks setup, the evaluation results, and a summary of the approaches used by the participants, and we discuss some lessons learned. Last but not least, we release to the research community all datasets from the lab as well as the evaluation scripts, which should enable further research in the important tasks of check-worthiness estimation and automatic claim verification.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationExperimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction - 11th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2020, Proceedings
EditorsAvi Arampatzis, Evangelos Kanoulas, Theodora Tsikrika, Stefanos Vrochidis, Hideo Joho, Christina Lioma, Carsten Eickhoff, Aurélie Névéol, Aurélie Névéol, Linda Cappellato, Nicola Ferro
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages215-236
Number of pages22
ISBN (Print)9783030582180
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event11th Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2020 - Thessaloniki, Greece
Duration: 22 Sept 202025 Sept 2020

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12260 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference11th Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2020
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityThessaloniki
Period22/09/2025/09/20

Keywords

  • Check-worthiness estimation
  • Computational journalism
  • Detecting previously fact-checked claims
  • Evidence-based verification
  • Fact-checking
  • Social media verification
  • Veracity

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