AFaCTA: Assisting the Annotation of Factual Claim Detection with Reliable LLM Annotators

Jingwei Ni, Minjing Shi, Dominik Stammbach, Mrinmaya Sachan, Elliott Ash, Markus Leippold


Abstract
With the rise of generative AI, automated fact-checking methods to combat misinformation are becoming more and more important. However, factual claim detection, the first step in a fact-checking pipeline, suffers from two key issues that limit its scalability and generalizability: (1) inconsistency in definitions of the task and what a claim is, and (2) the high cost of manual annotation. To address (1), we review the definitions in related work and propose a unifying definition of factual claims that focuses on verifiability. To address (2), we introduce AFaCTA (Automatic Factual Claim deTection Annotator), a novel framework that assists in the annotation of factual claims with the help of large language models (LLMs). AFaCTA calibrates its annotation confidence with consistency along three predefined reasoning paths. Extensive evaluation and experiments in the domain of political speech reveal that AFaCTA can efficiently assist experts in annotating factual claims and training high-quality classifiers, and can work with or without expert supervision. Our analyses also result in PoliClaim, a comprehensive claim detection dataset spanning diverse political topics.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.104
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1890–1912
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.104
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.104
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jingwei Ni, Minjing Shi, Dominik Stammbach, Mrinmaya Sachan, Elliott Ash, and Markus Leippold. 2024. AFaCTA: Assisting the Annotation of Factual Claim Detection with Reliable LLM Annotators. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1890–1912, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AFaCTA: Assisting the Annotation of Factual Claim Detection with Reliable LLM Annotators (Ni et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.104.pdf