DeClarE: Debunking Fake News and False Claims using Evidence-Aware Deep Learning
This addresses the problem of misinformation for society by improving automated fact-checking, though it is incremental as it builds on prior evidence-aware methods.
The paper tackles automated fact-checking by developing an end-to-end neural network model that assesses claim credibility using external evidence, language, and source trustworthiness, achieving strong results across four datasets.
Misinformation such as fake news is one of the big challenges of our society. Research on automated fact-checking has proposed methods based on supervised learning, but these approaches do not consider external evidence apart from labeled training instances. Recent approaches counter this deficit by considering external sources related to a claim. However, these methods require substantial feature modeling and rich lexicons. This paper overcomes these limitations of prior work with an end-to-end model for evidence-aware credibility assessment of arbitrary textual claims, without any human intervention. It presents a neural network model that judiciously aggregates signals from external evidence articles, the language of these articles and the trustworthiness of their sources. It also derives informative features for generating user-comprehensible explanations that makes the neural network predictions transparent to the end-user. Experiments with four datasets and ablation studies show the strength of our method.