Empowering the Fact-checkers! Automatic Identification of Claim Spans on Twitter

Megha Sundriyal, Atharva Kulkarni, Vaibhav Pulastya, Md. Shad Akhtar, Tanmoy Chakraborty


Abstract
The widespread diffusion of medical and political claims in the wake of COVID-19 has led to a voluminous rise in misinformation and fake news. The current vogue is to employ manual fact-checkers to efficiently classify and verify such data to combat this avalanche of claim-ridden misinformation. However, the rate of information dissemination is such that it vastly outpaces the fact-checkers’ strength. Therefore, to aid manual fact-checkers in eliminating the superfluous content, it becomes imperative to automatically identify and extract the snippets of claim-worthy (mis)information present in a post. In this work, we introduce the novel task of Claim Span Identification (CSI). We propose CURT, a large-scale Twitter corpus with token-level claim spans on more than 7.5k tweets. Furthermore, along with the standard token classification baselines, we benchmark our dataset with DABERTa, an adapter-based variation of RoBERTa. The experimental results attest that DABERTa outperforms the baseline systems across several evaluation metrics, improving by about 1.5 points. We also report detailed error analysis to validate the model’s performance along with the ablation studies. Lastly, we release our comprehensive span annotation guidelines for public use.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.525
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7701–7715
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.525
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.525
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Megha Sundriyal, Atharva Kulkarni, Vaibhav Pulastya, Md. Shad Akhtar, and Tanmoy Chakraborty. 2022. Empowering the Fact-checkers! Automatic Identification of Claim Spans on Twitter. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7701–7715, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Empowering the Fact-checkers! Automatic Identification of Claim Spans on Twitter (Sundriyal et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.525.pdf