Siddharth Varia


2020

pdf bib
DeSePtion: Dual Sequence Prediction and Adversarial Examples for Improved Fact-Checking
Christopher Hidey | Tuhin Chakrabarty | Tariq Alhindi | Siddharth Varia | Kriste Krstovski | Mona Diab | Smaranda Muresan
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The increased focus on misinformation has spurred development of data and systems for detecting the veracity of a claim as well as retrieving authoritative evidence. The Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) dataset provides such a resource for evaluating endto- end fact-checking, requiring retrieval of evidence from Wikipedia to validate a veracity prediction. We show that current systems for FEVER are vulnerable to three categories of realistic challenges for fact-checking – multiple propositions, temporal reasoning, and ambiguity and lexical variation – and introduce a resource with these types of claims. Then we present a system designed to be resilient to these “attacks” using multiple pointer networks for document selection and jointly modeling a sequence of evidence sentences and veracity relation predictions. We find that in handling these attacks we obtain state-of-the-art results on FEVER, largely due to improved evidence retrieval.