The Role of Context in Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims

Shaden Shaar, Firoj Alam, Giovanni Da San Martino, Preslav Nakov

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

12 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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 factchecking 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 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 multihop reasoning over the sentences of the document describing the fact-checked claim. The experimental results show that each of these represents a valuable information source, but that modeling the source-side context is most important, and can yield 10+ points of absolute improvement over a state-of-the-art model.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationNAACL 2022 - Findings
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1619-1631
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917766
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event2022 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022 - Seattle, United States
Duration: 10 Jul 202215 Jul 2022

Publication series

NameFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022 - Findings

Conference

Conference2022 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle
Period10/07/2215/07/22

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