“Image, Tell me your story!” Predicting the original meta-context of visual misinformation

Jonathan Tonglet, Marie-Francine Moens, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
To assist human fact-checkers, researchers have developed automated approaches for visual misinformation detection. These methods assign veracity scores by identifying inconsistencies between the image and its caption, or by detecting forgeries in the image. However, they neglect a crucial point of the human fact-checking process: identifying the original meta-context of the image. By explaining what is actually true about the image, fact-checkers can better detect misinformation, focus their efforts on check-worthy visual content, engage in counter-messaging before misinformation spreads widely, and make their explanation more convincing. Here, we fill this gap by introducing the task of automated image contextualization. We create 5Pils, a dataset of 1,676 fact-checked images with question-answer pairs about their original meta-context. Annotations are based on the 5 Pillars fact-checking framework. We implement a first baseline that grounds the image in its original meta-context using the content of the image and textual evidence retrieved from the open web. Our experiments show promising results while highlighting several open challenges in retrieval and reasoning.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.448
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7845–7864
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.448
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonathan Tonglet, Marie-Francine Moens, and Iryna Gurevych. 2024. “Image, Tell me your story!” Predicting the original meta-context of visual misinformation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7845–7864, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“Image, Tell me your story!” Predicting the original meta-context of visual misinformation (Tonglet et al., EMNLP 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.448.pdf
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