Automatic fact verification has received significant attention recently. Contemporary automatic fact-checking systems focus on estimating truthfulness using numerical scores which are not human-interpretable. A human fact-checker generally follows several logical steps to verify a verisimilitude claim and conclude whether it’s truthful or a mere masquerade. Popular fact-checking websites follow a common structure for fact categorization such as half true, half false, false, pants on fire, etc. Therefore, it is necessary to have an aspect-based (delineating which part(s) are true and which are false) explainable system that can assist human fact-checkers in asking relevant questions related to a fact, which can then be validated separately to reach a final verdict. In this paper, we propose a 5W framework (who, what, when, where, and why) for question-answer-based fact explainability. To that end, we present a semi-automatically generated dataset called FACTIFY-5WQA, which consists of 391, 041 facts along with relevant 5W QAs – underscoring our major contribution to this paper. A semantic role labeling system has been utilized to locate 5Ws, which generates QA pairs for claims using a masked language model. Finally, we report a baseline QA system to automatically locate those answers from evidence documents, which can serve as a baseline for future research in the field. Lastly, we propose a robust fact verification system that takes paraphrased claims and automatically validates them. The dataset and the baseline model are available at https: //github.com/ankuranii/acl-5W-QA

Social media plays a significant role in cross-cultural communication. A vast amount of this occurs in code-mixed and multilingual form, posing a significant challenge to Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for processing such information, like language identification, topic modeling, and named-entity recognition. To address this, we introduce a large-scale multilingual and multi-topic dataset MMT collected from Twitter (1.7 million Tweets), encompassing 13 coarse-grained and 63 fine-grained topics in the Indian context. We further annotate a subset of 5,346 tweets from the MMT dataset with various Indian languages and their code-mixed counterparts. Also, we demonstrate that the currently existing tools fail to capture the linguistic diversity in MMT on two downstream tasks, i.e., topic modeling and language identification. To facilitate future research, we will make the anonymized and annotated dataset available in the public domain.