Article Reranking by Memory-Enhanced Key Sentence Matching for Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims

Qiang Sheng, Juan Cao, Xueyao Zhang, Xirong Li, Lei Zhong


Abstract
False claims that have been previously fact-checked can still spread on social media. To mitigate their continual spread, detecting previously fact-checked claims is indispensable. Given a claim, existing works focus on providing evidence for detection by reranking candidate fact-checking articles (FC-articles) retrieved by BM25. However, these performances may be limited because they ignore the following characteristics of FC-articles: (1) claims are often quoted to describe the checked events, providing lexical information besides semantics; (2) sentence templates to introduce or debunk claims are common across articles, providing pattern information. Models that ignore the two aspects only leverage semantic relevance and may be misled by sentences that describe similar but irrelevant events. In this paper, we propose a novel reranker, MTM (Memory-enhanced Transformers for Matching) to rank FC-articles using key sentences selected with event (lexical and semantic) and pattern information. For event information, we propose a ROUGE-guided Transformer which is finetuned with regression of ROUGE. For pattern information, we generate pattern vectors for matching with sentences. By fusing event and pattern information, we select key sentences to represent an article and then predict if the article fact-checks the given claim using the claim, key sentences, and patterns. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that MTM outperforms existing methods. Human evaluation proves that MTM can capture key sentences for explanations.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.425
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5468–5481
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.425
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.425
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qiang Sheng, Juan Cao, Xueyao Zhang, Xirong Li, and Lei Zhong. 2021. Article Reranking by Memory-Enhanced Key Sentence Matching for Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5468–5481, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Article Reranking by Memory-Enhanced Key Sentence Matching for Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims (Sheng et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2021.acl-long.425.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2021.acl-long.425.mp4
Code
 ictmcg/mtm
Data
Snopes