ChronoFact: Timeline-based Temporal Fact Verification

TL;DR

ChronoFact is a novel timeline-based framework for verifying complex temporal claims by organizing events into chronological timelines and assessing their relationships, significantly improving accuracy in misinformation detection.

Contribution

Introduces a new timeline-based verification framework and dataset for complex temporal claims, enhancing the evaluation of temporal fact accuracy.

Findings

Effective in handling overlapping and recurring events

Outperforms existing methods in temporal claim verification

Provides a new dataset for training and evaluation

Abstract

Temporal claims, often riddled with inaccuracies, are a significant challenge in the digital misinformation landscape. Fact-checking systems that can accurately verify such claims are crucial for combating misinformation. Current systems struggle with the complexities of evaluating the accuracy of these claims, especially when they include multiple, overlapping, or recurring events. We introduce a novel timeline-based fact verification framework that identify events from both claim and evidence and organize them into their respective chronological timelines. The framework systematically examines the relationships between the events in both claim and evidence to predict the veracity of each claim event and their chronological accuracy. This allows us to accurately determine the overall veracity of the claim. We also introduce a new dataset of complex temporal claims involving timeline-based reasoning for the training and evaluation of our proposed framework. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in handling the intricacies of temporal claim verification.