What to Fact-Check: Guiding Check-Worthy Information Detection in News Articles through Argumentative Discourse Structure

Tariq Alhindi, Brennan McManus, Smaranda Muresan


Abstract
Most existing methods for automatic fact-checking start with a precompiled list of claims to verify. We investigate the understudied problem of determining what statements in news articles are worthy to fact-check. We annotate the argument structure of 95 news articles in the climate change domain that are fact-checked by climate scientists at climatefeedback.org. We release the first multi-layer annotated corpus for both argumentative discourse structure (argument types and relations) and for fact-checked statements in news articles. We discuss the connection between argument structure and check-worthy statements and develop several baseline models for detecting check-worthy statements in the climate change domain. Our preliminary results show that using information about argumentative discourse structure shows slight but statistically significant improvement over a baseline of local discourse structure.
Anthology ID:
2021.sigdial-1.40
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2021
Address:
Singapore and Online
Editors:
Haizhou Li, Gina-Anne Levow, Zhou Yu, Chitralekha Gupta, Berrak Sisman, Siqi Cai, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Yan Wu, Junyi Jessy Li
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
380–391
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.40
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.sigdial-1.40
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tariq Alhindi, Brennan McManus, and Smaranda Muresan. 2021. What to Fact-Check: Guiding Check-Worthy Information Detection in News Articles through Argumentative Discourse Structure. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 380–391, Singapore and Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What to Fact-Check: Guiding Check-Worthy Information Detection in News Articles through Argumentative Discourse Structure (Alhindi et al., SIGDIAL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.40.pdf
Video:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBT795ipFFM
Code
 tariq60/whattofactcheck