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The CLEF-2021 CheckThat! Lab on Detecting Check-Worthy Claims, Previously Fact-Checked Claims, and Fake News

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Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2021)

Abstract

We describe the fourth edition of the CheckThat! Lab, part of the 2021 Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The lab evaluates technology supporting various tasks related to factuality, and it is offered in Arabic, Bulgarian, English, and Spanish. Task 1 asks to predict which tweets in a Twitter stream are worth fact-checking (focusing on COVID-19). Task 2 asks to determine whether a claim in a tweet can be verified using a set of previously fact-checked claims. Task 3 asks to predict the veracity of a target news article and its topical domain. The evaluation is carried out using mean average precision or precision at rank k for the ranking tasks, and F\(_1\) for the classification tasks.

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Acknowledgments

The work of Tamer Elsayed and Maram Hasanain is made possible by NPRP grant #NPRP-11S-1204-170060 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The work of Fatima Haouari is supported by GSRA grant #GSRA6-1-0611-19074 from the Qatar National Research Fund. The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.

This research is also part of the Tanbih mega-project, developed at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, which aims to limit the effect of “fake news”, propaganda, and media bias.

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Nakov, P. et al. (2021). The CLEF-2021 CheckThat! Lab on Detecting Check-Worthy Claims, Previously Fact-Checked Claims, and Fake News. In: Hiemstra, D., Moens, MF., Mothe, J., Perego, R., Potthast, M., Sebastiani, F. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12657. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72240-1_75

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