A Benchmark for Open-Domain Numerical Fact-Checking Enhanced by Claim Decomposition
This work addresses the need for realistic benchmarks in automated fact-checking of numerical claims, which is critical for societal impact, though it is incremental as it builds on prior datasets and methods.
The authors tackled the problem of open-domain numerical fact-checking by introducing QuanTemp++, a dataset with natural numerical claims and relevant evidence collected through a claim decomposition process that mimics human fact-checkers, resulting in a benchmark that avoids temporal leakage and noisy sources.
Fact-checking numerical claims is critical as the presence of numbers provide mirage of veracity despite being fake potentially causing catastrophic impacts on society. The prior works in automatic fact verification do not primarily focus on natural numerical claims. A typical human fact-checker first retrieves relevant evidence addressing the different numerical aspects of the claim and then reasons about them to predict the veracity of the claim. Hence, the search process of a human fact-checker is a crucial skill that forms the foundation of the verification process. Emulating a real-world setting is essential to aid in the development of automated methods that encompass such skills. However, existing benchmarks employ heuristic claim decomposition approaches augmented with weakly supervised web search to collect evidences for verifying claims. This sometimes results in less relevant evidences and noisy sources with temporal leakage rendering a less realistic retrieval setting for claim verification. Hence, we introduce QuanTemp++: a dataset consisting of natural numerical claims, an open domain corpus, with the corresponding relevant evidence for each claim. The evidences are collected through a claim decomposition process approximately emulating the approach of human fact-checker and veracity labels ensuring there is no temporal leakage. Given this dataset, we also characterize the retrieval performance of key claim decomposition paradigms. Finally, we observe their effect on the outcome of the verification pipeline and draw insights. The code for data pipeline along with link to data can be found at https://github.com/VenkteshV/QuanTemp_Plus