John Dougrez-Lewis


2022

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PHEMEPlus: Enriching Social Media Rumour Verification with External Evidence
John Dougrez-Lewis | Elena Kochkina | Miguel Arana-Catania | Maria Liakata | Yulan He
Proceedings of the Fifth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)

Work on social media rumour verification utilises signals from posts, their propagation and users involved. Other lines of work target identifying and fact-checking claims based on information from Wikipedia, or trustworthy news articles without considering social media context. However works combining the information from social media with external evidence from the wider web are lacking. To facilitate research in this direction, we release a novel dataset, PHEMEPlus, an extension of the PHEME benchmark, which contains social media conversations as well as relevant external evidence for each rumour. We demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating such evidence in improving rumour verification models. Additionally, as part of the evidence collection, we evaluate various ways of query formulation to identify the most effective method.

2021

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Learning Disentangled Latent Topics for Twitter Rumour Veracity Classification
John Dougrez-Lewis | Maria Liakata | Elena Kochkina | Yulan He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021