Claim Check-Worthiness Detection: How Well do LLMs Grasp Annotation Guidelines?

Laura Majer, Jan Šnajder


Abstract
The rising threat of disinformation underscores the need to fully or partially automate the fact-checking process. Identifying text segments requiring fact-checking is known as claim detection (CD) and claim check-worthiness detection (CW), the latter incorporating complex domain-specific criteria of worthiness and often framed as a ranking task. Zero- and few-shot LLM prompting is an attractive option for both tasks, as it bypasses the need for labeled datasets and allows verbalized claim and worthiness criteria to be directly used for prompting. We evaluate the LLMs’ predictive accuracy on five CD/CW datasets from diverse domains, using corresponding annotation guidelines in prompts. We examine two key aspects: (1) how to best distill factuality and worthiness criteria into a prompt, and (2) how much context to provide for each claim. To this end, we experiment with different levels of prompt verbosity and varying amounts of contextual information given to the model. We additionally evaluate the top-performing models with ranking metrics, resembling prioritization done by fact-checkers. Our results show that optimal prompt verbosity varies, meta-data alone adds more performance boost than co-text, and confidence scores can be directly used to produce reliable check-worthiness rankings.
Anthology ID:
2024.fever-1.27
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Michael Schlichtkrull, Yulong Chen, Chenxi Whitehouse, Zhenyun Deng, Mubashara Akhtar, Rami Aly, Zhijiang Guo, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Oana Cocarascu, Arpit Mittal, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos
Venue:
FEVER
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
245–263
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.fever-1.27
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Laura Majer and Jan Šnajder. 2024. Claim Check-Worthiness Detection: How Well do LLMs Grasp Annotation Guidelines?. In Proceedings of the Seventh Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER), pages 245–263, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Claim Check-Worthiness Detection: How Well do LLMs Grasp Annotation Guidelines? (Majer & Šnajder, FEVER 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.fever-1.27.pdf