Program Enhanced Fact Verification with Verbalization and Graph Attention Network

Xiaoyu Yang, Feng Nie, Yufei Feng, Quan Liu, Zhigang Chen, Xiaodan Zhu


Abstract
Performing fact verification based on structured data is important for many real-life applications and is a challenging research problem, particularly when it involves both symbolic operations and informal inference based on language understanding. In this paper, we present a Program-enhanced Verbalization and Graph Attention Network (ProgVGAT) to integrate programs and execution into textual inference models. Specifically, a verbalization with program execution model is proposed to accumulate evidences that are embedded in operations over the tables. Built on that, we construct the graph attention verification networks, which are designed to fuse different sources of evidences from verbalized program execution, program structures, and the original statements and tables, to make the final verification decision. To support the above framework, we propose a program selection module optimized with a new training strategy based on margin loss, to produce more accurate programs, which is shown to be effective in enhancing the final verification results. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves the new state-of-the-art performance, a 74.4% accuracy, on the benchmark dataset TABFACT.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.628
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7810–7825
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.628
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.628
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoyu Yang, Feng Nie, Yufei Feng, Quan Liu, Zhigang Chen, and Xiaodan Zhu. 2020. Program Enhanced Fact Verification with Verbalization and Graph Attention Network. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 7810–7825, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Program Enhanced Fact Verification with Verbalization and Graph Attention Network (Yang et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2020.emnlp-main.628.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2020.emnlp-main.628.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939180
Code
 arielsho/Program-Enhanced-Table-Fact-Checking
Data
FEVERTabFact