  The reporting and analysis of current events around the globe has expanded
from professional, editor-lead journalism all the way to citizen journalism.
Politicians and other key players enjoy direct access to their audiences
through social media, bypassing the filters of official cables or traditional
media. However, the multiple advantages of free speech and direct communication
are dimmed by the misuse of the media to spread inaccurate or misleading
claims. These phenomena have led to the modern incarnation of the fact-checker
-- a professional whose main aim is to examine claims using available evidence
to assess their veracity. As in other text forensics tasks, the amount of
information available makes the work of the fact-checker more difficult. With
this in mind, starting from the perspective of the professional fact-checker,
we survey the available intelligent technologies that can support the human
expert in the different steps of her fact-checking endeavor. These include
identifying claims worth fact-checking; detecting relevant previously
fact-checked claims; retrieving relevant evidence to fact-check a claim; and
actually verifying a claim. In each case, we pay attention to the challenges in
future work and the potential impact on real-world fact-checking.
