FACTIFY-5WQA: 5W Aspect-based Fact Verification through Question Answering

Anku Rani, S.M Towhidul Islam Tonmoy, Dwip Dalal, Shreya Gautam, Megha Chakraborty, Aman Chadha, Amit Sheth, Amitava Das


Abstract
Automatic fact verification has received significant attention recently. Contemporary automatic fact-checking systems focus on estimating truthfulness using numerical scores which are not human-interpretable. A human fact-checker generally follows several logical steps to verify a verisimilitude claim and conclude whether it’s truthful or a mere masquerade. Popular fact-checking websites follow a common structure for fact categorization such as half true, half false, false, pants on fire, etc. Therefore, it is necessary to have an aspect-based (delineating which part(s) are true and which are false) explainable system that can assist human fact-checkers in asking relevant questions related to a fact, which can then be validated separately to reach a final verdict. In this paper, we propose a 5W framework (who, what, when, where, and why) for question-answer-based fact explainability. To that end, we present a semi-automatically generated dataset called FACTIFY-5WQA, which consists of 391, 041 facts along with relevant 5W QAs – underscoring our major contribution to this paper. A semantic role labeling system has been utilized to locate 5Ws, which generates QA pairs for claims using a masked language model. Finally, we report a baseline QA system to automatically locate those answers from evidence documents, which can serve as a baseline for future research in the field. Lastly, we propose a robust fact verification system that takes paraphrased claims and automatically validates them. The dataset and the baseline model are available at https: //github.com/ankuranii/acl-5W-QA
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.581
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10421–10440
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.581
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.581
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anku Rani, S.M Towhidul Islam Tonmoy, Dwip Dalal, Shreya Gautam, Megha Chakraborty, Aman Chadha, Amit Sheth, and Amitava Das. 2023. FACTIFY-5WQA: 5W Aspect-based Fact Verification through Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10421–10440, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FACTIFY-5WQA: 5W Aspect-based Fact Verification through Question Answering (Rani et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.581.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.581.mp4