@inproceedings{sriram-etal-2024-contrastive,
    title = "Contrastive Learning to Improve Retrieval for Real-World Fact Checking",
    author = "Sriram, Aniruddh  and
      Xu, Fangyuan  and
      Choi, Eunsol  and
      Durrett, Greg",
    editor = "Schlichtkrull, Michael  and
      Chen, Yulong  and
      Whitehouse, Chenxi  and
      Deng, Zhenyun  and
      Akhtar, Mubashara  and
      Aly, Rami  and
      Guo, Zhijiang  and
      Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Cocarascu, Oana  and
      Mittal, Arpit  and
      Thorne, James  and
      Vlachos, Andreas",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Seventh Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2024.fever-1.28/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.fever-1.28",
    pages = "264--279",
    abstract = "Recent work on fact-checking addresses a realistic setting where models incorporate evidence retrieved from the web to decide the veracity of claims. A bottleneck in this pipeline is in retrieving relevant evidence: traditional methods may surface documents directly related to a claim, but fact-checking complex claims requires more inferences. For instance, a document about how a vaccine was developed is relevant to addressing claims about what it might contain, even if it does not address them directly. We present Contrastive Fact-Checking Reranker (CFR), an improved retriever for this setting. By leveraging the AVeriTeC dataset, which annotates subquestions for claims with human written answers from evidence documents, we fine-tune Contriever with a contrastive objective based on multiple training signals, including distillation from GPT-4, evaluating subquestion answers, and gold labels in the dataset. We evaluate our model on both retrieval and end-to-end veracity judgments about claims. On the AVeriTeC dataset, we find a 6{\%} improvement in veracity classification accuracy. We also show our gains can be transferred to FEVER, ClaimDecomp, HotpotQA, and a synthetic dataset requiring retrievers to make inferences."
}