Islam Eldifrawi

Islam Eldifrawi, Shengrui Wang, Amine Trabelsi

Automated Fact-Checking (AFC) is the automated verification of claim accuracy. AFC is crucial in discerning truth from misinformation, especially given the huge amounts of content are generated online daily. Current research focuses on predicting claim veracity through metadata analysis and language scrutiny, with an emphasis on justifying verdicts. This paper surveys recent methodologies, proposing a comprehensive taxonomy and presenting the evolution of research in that landscape. A comparative analysis of methodologies and future directions for improving fact-checking explainability are also discussed.

Islam Eldifrawi, Shengrui Wang, Amine Trabelsi

With the vast amount of content uploaded every hour, along with the AI generated content that can include hallucinations, Automated Fact-Checking (AFC) has become increasingly vital, as it is infeasible for human fact-checkers to manually verify the sheer volume of information generated online. Professional fact-checkers have identified several gaps in existing AFC systems, noting a misalignment between how these systems operate and how fact-checking is performed in practice. In this paper, we introduce CAAFC (Chronological Actionable Automated Fact-Checker), a frame-work designed to bridge these gaps. It surpasses SOTA AFC and hallucination detection systems across multiple benchmark datasets. CAAFC operates on claims, conversations, and dialogues, enabling it not only to detect factual errors and hallucinations, but also to correct them by providing actionable justifications supported by primary information sources. Furthermore, CAAFC can update evidence and knowledge bases by incorporating recent and contextual information when necessary, thereby enhancing the reliability of fact verification.

Islam Eldifrawi, Shengrui Wang, Amine Trabelsi

The field of explainable Automatic Fact-Checking (AFC) aims to enhance the transparency and trustworthiness of automated fact-verification systems by providing clear and comprehensible explanations. However, the effectiveness of these explanations depends on their actionability --their ability to empower users to make informed decisions and mitigate misinformation. Despite actionability being a critical property of high-quality explanations, no prior research has proposed a dedicated method to evaluate it. This paper introduces FinGrAct, a fine-grained evaluation framework that can access the web, and it is designed to assess actionability in AFC explanations through well-defined criteria and an evaluation dataset. FinGrAct surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) evaluators, achieving the highest Pearson and Kendall correlation with human judgments while demonstrating the lowest ego-centric bias, making it a more robust evaluation approach for actionability evaluation in AFC.