PledgeTracker: A System for Monitoring the Fulfilment of Pledges

Yulong Chen, Michael Sejr Schlichtkrull, Zhenyun Deng, David Corney, Nasim Asl, Joshua Salisbury, Andrew Dudfield, Andreas Vlachos


Abstract
Political pledges reflect candidates’ policy commitments, but tracking their fulfilment requires reasoning over incremental evidence distributed across multiple, dynamically updated sources. Existing methods simplify this task into a document classification task, overlooking its dynamic temporal and multi-document nature. To address this issue, we introduce PledgeTracker, a system that reformulates pledge verification into structured event timeline construction. PledgeTracker consists of three core components: (1) a multi-step evidence retrieval module; (2) a timeline construction module and; (3) a fulfilment filtering module, allowing the capture of the evolving nature of pledge fulfilment and producing interpretable and structured timelines. We evaluate PledgeTracker in collaboration with professional fact-checkers in real-world workflows, demonstrating its effectiveness in retrieving relevant evidence and reducing human verification effort.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-demos.64
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Ivan Habernal, Peter Schulam, Jörg Tiedemann
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
839–850
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-demos.64/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yulong Chen, Michael Sejr Schlichtkrull, Zhenyun Deng, David Corney, Nasim Asl, Joshua Salisbury, Andrew Dudfield, and Andreas Vlachos. 2025. PledgeTracker: A System for Monitoring the Fulfilment of Pledges. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 839–850, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PledgeTracker: A System for Monitoring the Fulfilment of Pledges (Chen et al., EMNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-demos.64.pdf