From Relevance to Utility: Evidence Retrieval with Feedback for Fact Verification

Hengran Zhang, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan, Xueqi Cheng


Abstract
Retrieval-enhanced methods have become a primary approach in fact verification (FV); it requires reasoning over multiple retrieved pieces of evidence to verify the integrity of a claim. To retrieve evidence, existing work often employs off-the-shelf retrieval models whose design is based on the probability ranking principle. We argue that, rather than relevance, for FV we need to focus on the utility that a claim verifier derives from the retrieved evidence. We introduce the feedback-based evidence retriever (FER) that optimizes the evidence retrieval process by incorporating feedback from the claim verifier. As a feedback signal we use the divergence in utility between how effectively the verifier utilizes the retrieved evidence and the ground-truth evidence to produce the final claim label. Empirical studies demonstrate the superiority of FER over prevailing baselines.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.422
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:
6373–6384
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.422
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.422
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hengran Zhang, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan, and Xueqi Cheng. 2023. From Relevance to Utility: Evidence Retrieval with Feedback for Fact Verification. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 6373–6384, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Relevance to Utility: Evidence Retrieval with Feedback for Fact Verification (Zhang et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.422.pdf