WhatTheWikiFact: Fact-Checking Claims Against Wikipedia
This addresses the issue of false information on the internet for users and fact-checkers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing automatic fact-checking methods.
The authors tackled the problem of online misinformation by developing WhatTheWikiFact, an automatic claim verification system that uses Wikipedia to predict claim veracity and provide evidence, supporting Bulgarian, English, and Russian languages.
The rise of Internet has made it a major source of information. Unfortunately, not all information online is true, and thus a number of fact-checking initiatives have been launched, both manual and automatic, to deal with the problem. Here, we present our contribution in this regard: \emph{WhatTheWikiFact}, a system for automatic claim verification using Wikipedia. The system can predict the veracity of an input claim, and it further shows the evidence it has retrieved as part of the verification process. It shows confidence scores and a list of relevant Wikipedia articles, together with detailed information about each article, including the phrase used to retrieve it, the most relevant sentences extracted from it and their stance with respect to the input claim, as well as the associated probabilities. The system supports several languages: Bulgarian, English, and Russian.