Explainable Fact Checking with Probabilistic Answer Set Programming
This addresses the need for explainable fact checking, which is incremental as it builds on existing methods with probabilistic extensions.
The paper tackles the problem of improving transparency in fact checking by using knowledge graphs to assess claims and provide interpretable explanations, achieving higher quality results than state-of-the-art baselines.
One challenge in fact checking is the ability to improve the transparency of the decision. We present a fact checking method that uses reference information in knowledge graphs (KGs) to assess claims and explain its decisions. KGs contain a formal representation of knowledge with semantic descriptions of entities and their relationships. We exploit such rich semantics to produce interpretable explanations for the fact checking output. As information in a KG is inevitably incomplete, we rely on logical rule discovery and on Web text mining to gather the evidence to assess a given claim. Uncertain rules and facts are turned into logical programs and the checking task is modeled as an inference problem in a probabilistic extension of answer set programs. Experiments show that the probabilistic inference enables the efficient labeling of claims with interpretable explanations, and the quality of the results is higher than state of the art baselines.