A Context-Aware Approach for Detecting Worth-Checking Claims in Political Debates

Pepa Gencheva, Preslav Nakov, Lluís Màrquez, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Ivan Koychev

Abstract
In the context of investigative journalism, we address the problem of automatically identifying which claims in a given document are most worthy and should be prioritized for fact-checking. Despite its importance, this is a relatively understudied problem. Thus, we create a new corpus of political debates, containing statements that have been fact-checked by nine reputable sources, and we train machine learning models to predict which claims should be prioritized for fact-checking, i.e., we model the problem as a ranking task. Unlike previous work, which has looked primarily at sentences in isolation, in this paper we focus on a rich input representation modeling the context: relationship between the target statement and the larger context of the debate, interaction between the opponents, and reaction by the moderator and by the public. Our experiments show state-of-the-art results, outperforming a strong rivaling system by a margin, while also confirming the importance of the contextual information.
Anthology ID:
R17-1037
Volume:
Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2017
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd.
Note:
Pages:
267–276
Language:
URL:
https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-049-6_037
DOI:
10.26615/978-954-452-049-6_037
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pepa Gencheva, Preslav Nakov, Lluís Màrquez, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, and Ivan Koychev. 2017. A Context-Aware Approach for Detecting Worth-Checking Claims in Political Debates. In Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2017, pages 267–276, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd..
Cite (Informal):
A Context-Aware Approach for Detecting Worth-Checking Claims in Political Debates (Gencheva et al., RANLP 2017)
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https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-049-6_037
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