“Who said it, and Why?” Provenance for Natural Language Claims

Yi Zhang, Zachary Ives, Dan Roth


Abstract
In an era where generating content and publishing it is so easy, we are bombarded with information and are exposed to all kinds of claims, some of which do not always rank high on the truth scale. This paper suggests that the key to a longer-term, holistic, and systematic approach to navigating this information pollution is capturing the provenance of claims. To do that, we develop a formal definition of provenance graph for a given natural language claim, aiming to understand where the claim may come from and how it has evolved. To construct the graph, we model provenance inference, formulated mainly as an information extraction task and addressed via a textual entailment model. We evaluate our approach using two benchmark datasets, showing initial success in capturing the notion of provenance and its effectiveness on the application of claim verification.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.406
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4416–4426
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.406
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.406
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yi Zhang, Zachary Ives, and Dan Roth. 2020. “Who said it, and Why?” Provenance for Natural Language Claims. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 4416–4426, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“Who said it, and Why?” Provenance for Natural Language Claims (Zhang et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.406.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928725