BEVERS: A General, Simple, and Performant Framework for Automatic Fact Verification
This work provides a general, simple, and performant framework for fact verification, addressing the need for reliable automated systems in information verification, though it is incremental as it builds on standard approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of automatic fact verification by presenting BEVERS, a tuned baseline system that achieves the highest FEVER score and label accuracy on the FEVER dataset and the highest label accuracy on the Scifact dataset.
Automatic fact verification has become an increasingly popular topic in recent years and among datasets the Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) dataset is one of the most popular. In this work we present BEVERS, a tuned baseline system for the FEVER dataset. Our pipeline uses standard approaches for document retrieval, sentence selection, and final claim classification, however, we spend considerable effort ensuring optimal performance for each component. The results are that BEVERS achieves the highest FEVER score and label accuracy among all systems, published or unpublished. We also apply this pipeline to another fact verification dataset, Scifact, and achieve the highest label accuracy among all systems on that dataset as well. We also make our full code available.