Leveraging Social Discourse to Measure Check-worthiness of Claims for Fact-checking

TL;DR

This paper introduces CheckIt, a large annotated Twitter dataset for fine-grained claim check-worthiness, and proposes CheckMate, a system that jointly assesses whether a claim is worth fact-checking and identifies contributing factors.

Contribution

It presents a new dataset and a unified approach for fine-grained assessment of claim check-worthiness, addressing an open challenge in prioritizing claims for fact-checking.

Findings

CheckIt dataset effectively captures check-worthiness factors.

CheckMate outperforms baseline systems in identifying check-worthy claims.

Integration of check-worthiness factors improves detection accuracy.

Abstract

The expansion of online social media platforms has led to a surge in online content consumption. However, this has also paved the way for disseminating false claims and misinformation. As a result, there is an escalating demand for a substantial workforce to sift through and validate such unverified claims. Currently, these claims are manually verified by fact-checkers. Still, the volume of online content often outweighs their potency, making it difficult for them to validate every single claim in a timely manner. Thus, it is critical to determine which assertions are worth fact-checking and prioritize claims that require immediate attention. Multiple factors contribute to determining whether a claim necessitates fact-checking, encompassing factors such as its factual correctness, potential impact on the public, the probability of inciting hatred, and more. Despite several efforts to address claim check-worthiness, a systematic approach to identify these factors remains an open challenge. To this end, we introduce a new task of fine-grained claim check-worthiness, which underpins all of these factors and provides probable human grounds for identifying a claim as check-worthy. We present CheckIt, a manually annotated large Twitter dataset for fine-grained claim check-worthiness. We benchmark our dataset against a unified approach, CheckMate, that jointly determines whether a claim is check-worthy and the factors that led to that conclusion. We compare our suggested system with several baseline systems. Finally, we report a thorough analysis of results and human assessment, validating the efficacy of integrating check-worthiness factors in detecting claims worth fact-checking.