Reading and Reasoning over Chart Images for Evidence-based Automated Fact-Checking

Mubashara Akhtar, Oana Cocarascu, Elena Simperl


Abstract
Evidence data for automated fact-checking (AFC) can be in multiple modalities such as text, tables, images, audio, or video. While there is increasing interest in using images for AFC, previous works mostly focus on detecting manipulated or fake images. We propose a novel task, chart-based fact-checking, and introduce ChartBERT as the first model for AFC against chart evidence. ChartBERT leverages textual, structural and visual information of charts to determine the veracity of textual claims. For evaluation, we create ChartFC, a new dataset of 15,886 charts. We systematically evaluate 75 different vision-language (VL) baselines and show that ChartBERT outperforms VL models, achieving 63.8% accuracy. Our results suggest that the task is complex yet feasible, with many challenges ahead.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-eacl.30
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
399–414
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.30
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-eacl.30
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mubashara Akhtar, Oana Cocarascu, and Elena Simperl. 2023. Reading and Reasoning over Chart Images for Evidence-based Automated Fact-Checking. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023, pages 399–414, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Reading and Reasoning over Chart Images for Evidence-based Automated Fact-Checking (Akhtar et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.30.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.30.mp4