Learning to Generate and Evaluate Fact-checking Explanations with Transformers

TL;DR

This paper presents transformer-based models for generating and evaluating fact-checking explanations, emphasizing human-aligned assessment and practical improvements in transparency and trust in AI fact-checkers.

Contribution

It introduces new models for generating explanations and automatic evaluation metrics aligned with human judgments, advancing explainable AI in fact-checking.

Findings

Best generative model achieved ROUGE-1 score of 47.77.

Evaluation models showed MCC of around 0.7 for key dimensions.

Models improved transparency and trust in AI fact-checking.

Abstract

In an era increasingly dominated by digital platforms, the spread of misinformation poses a significant challenge, highlighting the need for solutions capable of assessing information veracity. Our research contributes to the field of Explainable Artificial Antelligence (XAI) by developing transformer-based fact-checking models that contextualise and justify their decisions by generating human-accessible explanations. Importantly, we also develop models for automatic evaluation of explanations for fact-checking verdicts across different dimensions such as \texttt{(self)-contradiction}, \texttt{hallucination}, \texttt{convincingness} and \texttt{overall quality}. By introducing human-centred evaluation methods and developing specialised datasets, we emphasise the need for aligning Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated explanations with human judgements. This approach not only advances theoretical knowledge in XAI but also holds practical implications by enhancing the transparency, reliability and users' trust in AI-driven fact-checking systems. Furthermore, the development of our metric learning models is a first step towards potentially increasing efficiency and reducing reliance on extensive manual assessment. Based on experimental results, our best performing generative model \textsc{ROUGE-1} score of 47.77, demonstrating superior performance in generating fact-checking explanations, particularly when provided with high-quality evidence. Additionally, the best performing metric learning model showed a moderately strong correlation with human judgements on objective dimensions such as \texttt{(self)-contradiction and \texttt{hallucination}, achieving a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of around 0.7.}