Comparing Knowledge Sources for Open-Domain Scientific Claim Verification

Juraj Vladika, Florian Matthes


Abstract
The increasing rate at which scientific knowledge is discovered and health claims shared online has highlighted the importance of developing efficient fact-checking systems for scientific claims. The usual setting for this task in the literature assumes that the documents containing the evidence for claims are already provided and annotated or contained in a limited corpus. This renders the systems unrealistic for real-world settings where knowledge sources with potentially millions of documents need to be queried to find relevant evidence. In this paper, we perform an array of experiments to test the performance of open-domain claim verification systems. We test the final verdict prediction of systems on four datasets of biomedical and health claims in different settings. While keeping the pipeline’s evidence selection and verdict prediction parts constant, document retrieval is performed over three common knowledge sources (PubMed, Wikipedia, Google) and using two different information retrieval techniques. We show that PubMed works better with specialized biomedical claims, while Wikipedia is more suited for everyday health concerns. Likewise, BM25 excels in retrieval precision, while semantic search in recall of relevant evidence. We discuss the results, outline frequent retrieval patterns and challenges, and provide promising future directions.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.128
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2103–2114
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.128
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Juraj Vladika and Florian Matthes. 2024. Comparing Knowledge Sources for Open-Domain Scientific Claim Verification. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2103–2114, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Comparing Knowledge Sources for Open-Domain Scientific Claim Verification (Vladika & Matthes, EACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.128.pdf
Software:
 2024.eacl-long.128.software.zip