Empowering COVID-19 Fact-Checking with Extended Knowledge Graphs

Abstract

During the COVID-19 outbreak, fake news regarding the disease have spread at an increasing rate. Let’s think, for instance, to face masks wearing related news or various home-made treatments to cure the disease. To contrast this phenomenon, the fact-checking community has intensified its efforts by producing a large number of fact-checking reports. In this work, we focus on empowering knowledge-based approaches for misinformation identification with previous knowledge gathered from existing fact-checking reports. Very few works in literature have exploited the information regarding claims that have been already fact-checked. The main idea that we explore in this work is to exploit the detailed information in the COVID-19 fact check reports in order to create an extended Knowledge Graph. By analysing the graph information about the already checked claims, we can verify newly coming content more effectively. Another gap that we aim to fill is the temporal representation of the facts stored in the knowledge graph. At the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to associate the temporal validity to the KG relations. This additional information can be used to further enhance the validation of claims.