Explainable Automated Fact-Checking for Public Health Claims

Neema Kotonya, Francesca Toni


Abstract
Fact-checking is the task of verifying the veracity of claims by assessing their assertions against credible evidence. The vast majority of fact-checking studies focus exclusively on political claims. Very little research explores fact-checking for other topics, specifically subject matters for which expertise is required. We present the first study of explainable fact-checking for claims which require specific expertise. For our case study we choose the setting of public health. To support this case study we construct a new dataset PUBHEALTH of 11.8K claims accompanied by journalist crafted, gold standard explanations (i.e., judgments) to support the fact-check labels for claims. We explore two tasks: veracity prediction and explanation generation. We also define and evaluate, with humans and computationally, three coherence properties of explanation quality. Our results indicate that, by training on in-domain data, gains can be made in explainable, automated fact-checking for claims which require specific expertise.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.623
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:
7740–7754
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.623
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.623
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Neema Kotonya and Francesca Toni. 2020. Explainable Automated Fact-Checking for Public Health Claims. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 7740–7754, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Explainable Automated Fact-Checking for Public Health Claims (Kotonya & Toni, EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2020.emnlp-main.623.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939277
Code
 neemakot/Health-Fact-Checking
Data
PUBHEALTHFEVERLIARMultiFCSNLI