Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims
David Wadden, Shanchuan Lin, Kyle Lo, Lucy Lu Wang, Madeleine van Zuylen, Arman Cohan, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Abstract
We introduce scientific claim verification, a new task to select abstracts from the research literature containing evidence that SUPPORTS or REFUTES a given scientific claim, and to identify rationales justifying each decision. To study this task, we construct SciFact, a dataset of 1.4K expert-written scientific claims paired with evidence-containing abstracts annotated with labels and rationales. We develop baseline models for SciFact, and demonstrate that simple domain adaptation techniques substantially improve performance compared to models trained on Wikipedia or political news. We show that our system is able to verify claims related to COVID-19 by identifying evidence from the CORD-19 corpus. Our experiments indicate that SciFact will provide a challenging testbed for the development of new systems designed to retrieve and reason over corpora containing specialized domain knowledge. Data and code for this new task are publicly available at https://github.com/allenai/scifact. A leaderboard and COVID-19 fact-checking demo are available at https://scifact.apps.allenai.org.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.emnlp-main.609
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 7534–7550
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.609
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.609
- Cite (ACL):
- David Wadden, Shanchuan Lin, Kyle Lo, Lucy Lu Wang, Madeleine van Zuylen, Arman Cohan, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. 2020. Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 7534–7550, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims (Wadden et al., EMNLP 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.emnlp-main.609.pdf
- Code
- allenai/scifact + additional community code
- Data
- SciFact, CORD-19, PubMedQA, S2ORC