Overview of the CLEF-2019 CheckThat! Lab: Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims

Tamer Elsayed, Preslav Nakov, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Maram Hasanain*, Reem Suwaileh, Giovanni Da San Martino, Pepa Atanasova

*Corresponding author for this work

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

71 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We present an overview of the second edition of the CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2019. The lab featured two tasks in two different languages: English and Arabic. Task 1 (English) challenged the participating systems to predict which claims in a political debate or speech should be prioritized for fact-checking. Task 2 (Arabic) asked to (A) rank a given set of Web pages with respect to a check-worthy claim based on their usefulness for fact-checking that claim, (B) classify these same Web pages according to their degree of usefulness for fact-checking the target claim, (C) identify useful passages from these pages, and (D) use the useful pages to predict the claim’s factuality. CheckThat! provided a full evaluation framework, consisting of data in English (derived from fact-checking sources) and Arabic (gathered and annotated from scratch) and evaluation based on mean average precision (MAP) and normalized discounted cumulative gain (nDCG) for ranking, and F $$:1$$ for classification. A total of 47 teams registered to participate in this lab, and fourteen of them actually submitted runs (compared to nine last year). The evaluation results show that the most successful approaches to Task 1 used various neural networks and logistic regression. As for Task 2, learning-to-rank was used by the highest scoring runs for subtask A, while different classifiers were used in the other subtasks. 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 - 10th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2019, Proceedings
EditorsFabio Crestani, Martin Braschler, Jacques Savoy, Andreas Rauber, Henning Müller, David E. Losada, Gundula Heinatz Bürki, Linda Cappellato, Nicola Ferro
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages301-321
Number of pages21
ISBN (Print)9783030285760
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event10th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2019 - Lugano, Switzerland
Duration: 9 Sept 201912 Sept 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11696 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference10th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2019
Country/TerritorySwitzerland
CityLugano
Period9/09/1912/09/19

Keywords

  • Check-worthiness estimation
  • Computational journalism
  • Evidence-based verification
  • Fact-checking
  • Fake news detection
  • Veracity

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