PHEMEPlus: Enriching Social Media Rumour Verification with External Evidence

John Dougrez-Lewis, Elena Kochkina, Miguel Arana-Catania, Maria Liakata, Yulan He


Abstract
Work on social media rumour verification utilises signals from posts, their propagation and users involved. Other lines of work target identifying and fact-checking claims based on information from Wikipedia, or trustworthy news articles without considering social media context. However works combining the information from social media with external evidence from the wider web are lacking. To facilitate research in this direction, we release a novel dataset, PHEMEPlus, an extension of the PHEME benchmark, which contains social media conversations as well as relevant external evidence for each rumour. We demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating such evidence in improving rumour verification models. Additionally, as part of the evidence collection, we evaluate various ways of query formulation to identify the most effective method.
Anthology ID:
2022.fever-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Rami Aly, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Oana Cocarascu, Zhijiang Guo, Arpit Mittal, Michael Schlichtkrull, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos
Venue:
FEVER
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
49–58
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.fever-1.6
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.fever-1.6
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
John Dougrez-Lewis, Elena Kochkina, Miguel Arana-Catania, Maria Liakata, and Yulan He. 2022. PHEMEPlus: Enriching Social Media Rumour Verification with External Evidence. In Proceedings of the Fifth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER), pages 49–58, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PHEMEPlus: Enriching Social Media Rumour Verification with External Evidence (Dougrez-Lewis et al., FEVER 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.fever-1.6.pdf
Code
 johnnlp/phemeplus