Explainable Claim Verification via Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning with Large Language Models

Haoran Wang, Kai Shu


Abstract
Claim verification plays a crucial role in combating misinformation. While existing works on claim verification have shown promising results, a crucial piece of the puzzle that remains unsolved is to understand how to verify claims without relying on human-annotated data, which is expensive to create at a large scale. Additionally, it is important for models to provide comprehensive explanations that can justify their decisions and assist human fact-checkers. This paper presents First-Order-Logic-Guided Knowledge-Grounded (FOLK) Reasoning that can verify complex claims and generate explanations without the need for annotated evidence using Large Language Models (LLMs). FOLK leverages the in-context learning ability of LLMs to translate the claim into a First-Order-Logic (FOL) clause consisting of predicates, each corresponding to a sub-claim that needs to be verified. Then, FOLK performs FOL-Guided reasoning over a set of knowledge-grounded question-and-answer pairs to make veracity predictions and generate explanations to justify its decision-making process. This process makes our model highly explanatory, providing clear explanations of its reasoning process in human-readable form. Our experiment results indicate that FOLK outperforms strong baselines on three datasets encompassing various claim verification challenges. Our code and data are available.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.416
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6288–6304
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.416
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.416
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haoran Wang and Kai Shu. 2023. Explainable Claim Verification via Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning with Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 6288–6304, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Explainable Claim Verification via Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning with Large Language Models (Wang & Shu, Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.416.pdf