Abstract
We present an overview of the second edition of the CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2019. The lab featured two tasks in two different languages: English and Arabic. Task 1 (English) challenged the participating systems to predict which claims in a political debate or speech should be prioritized for fact-checking. Task 2 (Arabic) asked to (A) rank a given set of Web pages with respect to a check-worthy claim based on their usefulness for fact-checking that claim, (B) classify these same Web pages according to their degree of usefulness for fact-checking the target claim, (C) identify useful passages from these pages, and (D) use the useful pages to predict the claim’s factuality. CheckThat! provided a full evaluation framework, consisting of data in English (derived from fact-checking sources) and Arabic (gathered and annotated from scratch) and evaluation based on mean average precision (MAP) and normalized discounted cumulative gain (nDCG) for ranking, and F\(_1\) for classification. A total of 47 teams registered to participate in this lab, and fourteen of them actually submitted runs (compared to nine last year). The evaluation results show that the most successful approaches to Task 1 used various neural networks and logistic regression. As for Task 2, learning-to-rank was used by the highest scoring runs for subtask A, while different classifiers were used in the other subtasks. We release to the research community all datasets from the lab as well as the evaluation scripts, which should enable further research in the important tasks of check-worthiness estimation and automatic claim verification.
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Notes
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Their claim crawling tool: http://github.comx/vwoloszyn/fake_news_extractor.
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In 2018, we had a different fact-checking task, where no retrieved Web pages were provided [6].
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Acknowledgments
This work was made possible in part by NPRP grant# NPRP 7-1330-2-483 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.
This research is also part of the Tanbih project,Footnote 5 which aims to limit the effect of “fake news”, propaganda and media bias by making users aware of what they are reading. The project is developed in collaboration between the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), HBKU and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
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Elsayed, T. et al. (2019). Overview of the CLEF-2019 CheckThat! Lab: Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims. In: Crestani, F., et al. Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction. CLEF 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11696. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28577-7_25
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