LogicalFactChecker: Leveraging Logical Operations for Fact Checking with Graph Module Network

Wanjun Zhong, Duyu Tang, Zhangyin Feng, Nan Duan, Ming Zhou, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Jiahai Wang, Jian Yin


Abstract
Verifying the correctness of a textual statement requires not only semantic reasoning about the meaning of words, but also symbolic reasoning about logical operations like count, superlative, aggregation, etc. In this work, we propose LogicalFactChecker, a neural network approach capable of leveraging logical operations for fact checking. It achieves the state-of-the-art performance on TABFACT, a large-scale, benchmark dataset built for verifying a textual statement with semi-structured tables. This is achieved by a graph module network built upon the Transformer-based architecture. With a textual statement and a table as the input, LogicalFactChecker automatically derives a program (a.k.a. logical form) of the statement in a semantic parsing manner. A heterogeneous graph is then constructed to capture not only the structures of the table and the program, but also the connections between inputs with different modalities. Such a graph reveals the related contexts of each word in the statement, the table and the program. The graph is used to obtain graph-enhanced contextual representations of words in Transformer-based architecture. After that, a program-driven module network is further introduced to exploit the hierarchical structure of the program, where semantic compositionality is dynamically modeled along the program structure with a set of function-specific modules. Ablation experiments suggest that both the heterogeneous graph and the module network are important to obtain strong results.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.539
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:
6053–6065
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.539
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.539
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wanjun Zhong, Duyu Tang, Zhangyin Feng, Nan Duan, Ming Zhou, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Jiahai Wang, and Jian Yin. 2020. LogicalFactChecker: Leveraging Logical Operations for Fact Checking with Graph Module Network. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 6053–6065, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LogicalFactChecker: Leveraging Logical Operations for Fact Checking with Graph Module Network (Zhong et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.539.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928864
Data
FEVER