Beyond Fact Verification: Comparing and Contrasting Claims on Contentious Topics

Abstract

As the importance of identifying misinformation is increasing, many researchers focus on verifying textual claims on the web. One of the most popular tasks to achieve this is fact verification, which retrieves an evidence sentence from a large knowledge source such as Wikipedia to either verify or refute each factual claim. However, while such problem formulation is helpful for detecting false claims and fake news, it is not applicable to catching subtle differences in factually consistent claims which still might implicitly bias the readers, especially in contentious topics such as political, gender, or racial issues. In this study, we propose ClaimDiff, a novel dataset to compare the nuance between claim pairs in both a discriminative and a generative manner, with the underlying assumption that one is not necessarily more true than the other. This differs from existing fact verification datasets that verify the target sentence with respect to an absolute truth. We hope this task assists people in making more informed decisions among various sources of media.