Document-level Claim Extraction and Decontextualisation for Fact-Checking

Selecting which claims to check is a time-consuming task for human fact-checkers, especially from documents consisting of multiple sentences and containing multiple claims. However, existing claim extraction approaches focus more on identifying and extracting claims from individual sentences, e.g., identifying whether a sentence contains a claim or the exact boundaries of the claim within a sentence. In this paper, we propose a method for document-level claim extraction for fact-checking, which aims to extract check-worthy claims from documents and decontextualise them so that they can be understood out of context. Specifically, we first recast claim extraction as extractive summarization in order to identify central sentences from documents, then rewrite them to include necessary context from the originating document through sentence decontextualisation. Evaluation with both automatic metrics and a fact-checking professional shows that our method is able to extract check-worthy claims from documents more accurately than previous work, while also improving evidence retrieval.

Automated Focused Feedback Generation for Scientific Writing Assistance

Scientific writing is a challenging task, particularly for novice researchers who often rely on feedback from experienced peers. Recent work has primarily focused on improving surface form and style rather than manuscript content. In this paper, we propose a novel task: automated focused feedback generation for scientific writing assistance. We present SWIF$^{2}$T: a Scientific WrIting Focused Feedback Tool. It is designed to generate specific, actionable and coherent comments, which identify weaknesses in a scientific paper and/or propose revisions to it. Our approach consists of four components - planner, investigator, reviewer and controller - leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) to implement them. We compile a dataset of 300 peer reviews citing weaknesses in scientific papers and conduct human evaluation. The results demonstrate the superiority in specificity, reading comprehension, and overall helpfulness of SWIF$^{2}$T's feedback compared to other approaches. In our analysis, we also identified cases where automatically generated reviews were judged better than human ones, suggesting opportunities for integration of AI-generated feedback in scientific writing.

AnchorAL: Computationally Efficient Active Learning for Large and Imbalanced Datasets

Active learning for imbalanced classification tasks is challenging as the minority classes naturally occur rarely. Gathering a large pool of unlabelled data is thus essential to capture minority instances. Standard pool-based active learning is computationally expensive on large pools and often reaches low accuracy by overfitting the initial decision boundary, thus failing to explore the input space and find minority instances. To address these issues we propose AnchorAL. At each iteration, AnchorAL chooses class-specific instances from the labelled set, or anchors, and retrieves the most similar unlabelled instances from the pool. This resulting subpool is then used for active learning. Using a small, fixed-sized subpool AnchorAL allows scaling any active learning strategy to large pools. By dynamically selecting different anchors at each iteration it promotes class balance and prevents overfitting the initial decision boundary, thus promoting the discovery of new clusters of minority instances. Experiments across different classification tasks, active learning strategies, and model architectures AnchorAL is (i) faster, often reducing runtime from hours to minutes, (ii) trains more performant models, (iii) and returns more balanced datasets than competing methods.

PRobELM: Plausibility Ranking Evaluation for Language Models

This paper introduces PRobELM (Plausibility Ranking Evaluation for Language Models), a benchmark designed to assess language models' ability to discern more plausible from less plausible scenarios through their parametric knowledge. While benchmarks such as TruthfulQA emphasise factual accuracy or truthfulness, and others such as COPA explore plausible scenarios without explicitly incorporating world knowledge, PRobELM seeks to bridge this gap by evaluating models' capabilities to prioritise plausible scenarios that leverage world knowledge over less plausible alternatives. This design allows us to assess the potential of language models for downstream use cases such as literature-based discovery where the focus is on identifying information that is likely but not yet known. Our benchmark is constructed from a dataset curated from Wikidata edit histories, tailored to align the temporal bounds of the training data for the evaluated models. PRobELM facilitates the evaluation of language models across multiple prompting types, including statement, text completion, and question-answering. Experiments with 10 models of various sizes and architectures on the relationship between model scales, training recency, and plausibility performance, reveal that factual accuracy does not directly correlate with plausibility performance and that up-to-date training data enhances plausibility assessment across different model architectures.

The effect of diversity on group decision-making

We explore different aspects of cognitive diversity and its effect on the success of group deliberation. To evaluate this, we use 500 dialogues from small, online groups discussing the Wason Card Selection task - the DeliData corpus. Leveraging the corpus, we perform quantitative analysis evaluating three different measures of cognitive diversity. First, we analyse the effect of group size as a proxy measure for diversity. Second, we evaluate the effect of the size of the initial idea pool. Finally, we look into the content of the discussion by analysing discussed solutions, discussion patterns, and how conversational probing can improve those characteristics. Despite the reputation of groups for compounding bias, we show that small groups can, through dialogue, overcome intuitive biases and improve individual decision-making. Across a large sample and different operationalisations, we consistently find that greater cognitive diversity is associated with more successful group deliberation. Code and data used for the analysis are available in the anonymised repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/ r/cogsci24-FD6D

Do We Need Language-Specific Fact-Checking Models? The Case of Chinese

This paper investigates the potential benefits of language-specific fact-checking models, focusing on the case of Chinese. We demonstrate the limitations of methods such as translating Chinese claims and evidence into English or directly using multilingual large language models (e.g. GPT4), highlighting the need for language-specific systems. We further develop a state-of-the-art Chinese fact-checking system that, in contrast to previous approaches which treat evidence selection as a pairwise sentence classification task, considers the context of sentences. We also create an adversarial dataset to identify biases in our model, and while they are present as in English language datasets and models, they are often specific to the Chinese culture. Our study emphasizes the importance of language-specific fact-checking models to effectively combat misinformation.

Zero-Shot Fact-Checking with Semantic Triples and Knowledge Graphs

Despite progress in automated fact-checking, most systems require a significant amount of labeled training data, which is expensive. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot method, which instead of operating directly on the claim and evidence sentences, decomposes them into semantic triples augmented using external knowledge graphs, and uses large language models trained for natural language inference. This allows it to generalize to adversarial datasets and domains that supervised models require specific training data for. Our empirical results show that our approach outperforms previous zero-shot approaches on FEVER, FEVER-Symmetric, FEVER 2.0, and Climate-FEVER, while being comparable or better than supervised models on the adversarial and the out-of-domain datasets.

Faster Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding with Confidence-based Pruning

Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding outputs the hypothesis with the highest expected utility over the model distribution for some utility function. It has been shown to improve accuracy over beam search in conditional language generation problems and especially neural machine translation, in both human and automatic evaluations. However, the standard sampling-based algorithm for MBR is substantially more computationally expensive than beam search, requiring a large number of samples as well as a quadratic number of calls to the utility function, limiting its applicability. We describe an algorithm for MBR which gradually grows the number of samples used to estimate the utility while pruning hypotheses that are unlikely to have the highest utility according to confidence estimates obtained with bootstrap sampling. Our method requires fewer samples and drastically reduces the number of calls to the utility function compared to standard MBR while being statistically indistinguishable in terms of accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in experiments on three language pairs, using chrF++ and COMET as utility/evaluation metrics.

Automated Fact-Checking in Dialogue: Are Specialized Models Needed?

Prior research has shown that typical fact-checking models for stand-alone claims struggle with claims made in dialogues. As a solution, fine-tuning these models on labelled dialogue data has been proposed. However, creating separate models for each use case is impractical, and we show that fine-tuning models for dialogue results in poor performance on typical fact-checking. To overcome this challenge, we present techniques that allow us to use the same models for both dialogue and typical fact-checking. These mainly focus on retrieval adaptation and transforming conversational inputs so that they can be accurately predicted by models trained on stand-alone claims. We demonstrate that a typical fact-checking model incorporating these techniques is competitive with state-of-the-art models fine-tuned for dialogue, while maintaining its accuracy on stand-alone claims.

QA-NatVer: Question Answering for Natural Logic-based Fact Verification

Fact verification systems assess a claim's veracity based on evidence. An important consideration in designing them is faithfulness, i.e. generating explanations that accurately reflect the reasoning of the model. Recent works have focused on natural logic, which operates directly on natural language by capturing the semantic relation of spans between an aligned claim with its evidence via set-theoretic operators. However, these approaches rely on substantial resources for training, which are only available for high-resource languages. To this end, we propose to use question answering to predict natural logic operators, taking advantage of the generalization capabilities of instruction-tuned language models. Thus, we obviate the need for annotated training data while still relying on a deterministic inference system. In a few-shot setting on FEVER, our approach outperforms the best baseline by $4.3$ accuracy points, including a state-of-the-art pre-trained seq2seq natural logic system, as well as a state-of-the-art prompt-based classifier. Our system demonstrates its robustness and portability, achieving competitive performance on a counterfactual dataset and surpassing all approaches without further annotation on a Danish verification dataset. A human evaluation indicates that our approach produces more plausible proofs with fewer erroneous natural logic operators than previous natural logic-based systems.