Fact-Checking Complex Claims with Program-Guided Reasoning

Liangming Pan, Xiaobao Wu, Xinyuan Lu, Anh Tuan Luu, William Yang Wang, Min-Yen Kan, Preslav Nakov


Abstract
Fact-checking real-world claims often requires collecting multiple pieces of evidence and applying complex multi-step reasoning. In this paper, we present Program-Guided Fact-Checking (ProgramFC), a novel fact-checking model that decomposes complex claims into simpler sub-tasks that can be solved using a shared library of specialized functions. We first leverage the in-context learning ability of large language models to generate reasoning programs to guide the verification process. Afterward, we execute the program by delegating each sub-task to the corresponding sub-task handler. This process makes our model both explanatory and data-efficient, providing clear explanations of its reasoning process and requiring minimal training data. We evaluate ProgramFC on two challenging fact-checking datasets and show that it outperforms seven fact-checking baselines across different settings of evidence availability, with explicit output programs that benefit human debugging. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/ProgramFC.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.386
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6981–7004
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.386
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.386
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liangming Pan, Xiaobao Wu, Xinyuan Lu, Anh Tuan Luu, William Yang Wang, Min-Yen Kan, and Preslav Nakov. 2023. Fact-Checking Complex Claims with Program-Guided Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6981–7004, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fact-Checking Complex Claims with Program-Guided Reasoning (Pan et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
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