Abstract: Recent Deep Learning (DL) models have succeeded in achieving human-level accuracy on various natural language tasks such as question-answering, natural language inference (NLI), and textual entailment. These tasks not only require the contextual knowledge but also the reasoning abilities to be solved efficiently. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised question-answering based approach for a similar task, fact-checking. We transform the FEVER dataset into a Cloze-task by masking named entities provided in the claims. To predict the answer token, we utilize pre-trained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The classifier computes label based on the correctly answered questions and a threshold. Currently, the classifier is able to classify the claims as "SUPPORTS" and "MANUAL_REVIEW". This approach achieves a label accuracy of 80.2% on the development set and 80.25% on the test set of the transformed dataset.

Introduction: Every day textual information is being added/updated on Wikipedia, as well as other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. These platforms receive a huge amount of unverified textual data from all its users such as News Channels, Bloggers, Journalists, Field-Experts which ought to be verified before other users start consuming it. This information boom has increased the demand of information verification also known as Fact Checking. Apart from the encyclopedia and other platforms, domains like scientific publications and e-commerce also require information verification for reliability purposes. Generally, Wikipedia authors, bloggers, journalists and scientists provide references to support their claims. Providing referenced text against the claims makes the fact checking task a little easier as the verification system no longer needs to search for the relevant documents. Wikipedia manages to verify all this new information with a number of human reviewers. Manual review processes introduce delays in publishing and is not a well scalable approach. To address this issue, researchers have launched relevant challenges, such as the Fake News Challenge (BIBREF0), Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) (BIBREF1) challenge along with the datasets. Moreover, Thorne and Vlachos (BIBREF2) released a survey on the current models for automated fact-checking. FEVER is the largest dataset and contains around 185k claims from the corpus of 5.4M Wikipedia articles. The claims are labeled as “SUPPORTS”, “REFUTES”, or “NOT ENOUGH INFO”, based on the evidence set. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised question-answering based approach for solving the fact-checking problem. This approach is inspired from the memory-based reading comprehension task that humans perform at an early age. As we know that kids in schools, first read and learn the syllabus content so that they can answer the questions in the exam. Similarly, our model learns a language model and linguistics features in unsupervised fashion from the provided Wikipedia pages. To transform the FEVER dataset into the above-mentioned task, we first generate the questions from the claims. In literature, there are majorly two types of Question Generation systems: Rule-based and Neural Question Generation (NQG) model based. Ali et al. (BIBREF3) proposed a rule-based pipeline to automate the question generation using POS (Part-of-speech) tagging and Named Entity Recognition (NER) tagging from the sentences. Recently, many NQG models have been introduced to generate questions in natural language. Serban et al. (BIBREF4) achieved better performance for question generation utilizing (passage, question, answer) triplets as training data and an encoder-decoder based architecture as their learning model. Du et al. (BIBREF5) introduced a sequence-to-sequence model with an attention mechanism, outperforming rule-base question generation systems. Although the models proposed in (BIBREF6; BIBREF7) are effective, they require a passage to generate the plausible questions which is not readily available in the FEVER dataset. To resolve the issues and to keep the system simple but effective, we chose to generate questions similar to a Cloze-task or masked language modeling task. Such a task makes the problem more tractable as the masked entities are already known (i.e. named entities) and tight as there is only one correct answer for a given question. Later when the answers are generated, due to the question generation process, it becomes very easy to identify the correct answers. We use the BERT's (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) (BIBREF8) masked language model, that is pre-trained on Wikipedia articles for predicting the masked entities. Currently, neither the claim verification process nor the question generation process mandates explicit reasoning. For the same reason, it is difficult to put “REFUTES” or “NOT ENOUGH INFO” labels. To resolve this issue, we classify the unsupported claims as “MANUAL_REVIEW” instead of labeling them as “NOT ENOUGH INFO” or “REFUTES”. In the literature, the shared task has been tackled using pipeline-based supervised models (BIBREF9; BIBREF10; BIBREF11). To our knowledge, only BIBREF10 has provided the confusion matrix for each of the labels for their supervised system. For the same reason, we are only providing the comparison of the label accuracy on the “SUPPORTS” label in the results section.

Question: What baseline did they use?
Answer: HexaF - UCL