Pipeline and dataset generation for automated fact-checking in almost any language

Abstract

This article presents a pipeline for automated fact-checking leveraging publicly available language models and data. The objective is to assess the accuracy of textual claims using evidence from a ground-truth evidence corpus. The pipeline consists of two main modules—the evidence retrieval and the claim veracity evaluation. Our primary focus is on the ease of deployment in various languages that remain unexplored in the field of automated fact-checking. Unlike most similar pipelines, which work with evidence sentences, our pipeline processes data on a paragraph level, simplifying the overall architecture and data requirements. Given the high cost of annotating language-specific fact-checking training data, our solution builds on the question answering for claim generation method, which we adapt and use to generate the data for all models of the pipeline. Our strategy enables the introduction of new languages through machine translation of only two fixed datasets of moderate size. Subsequently, any number of training samples can be generated based on an evidence corpus in the target language. We provide open access to all data and fine-tuned models for Czech, English, Polish, and Slovak pipelines, as well as to our codebase that may be used to reproduce the results. We comprehensively evaluate the pipelines for all four languages, including human annotations and per-sample difficulty assessment using Pointwise $${\mathcal {V}}$$ V -information. The presented experiments are based on full Wikipedia snapshots to promote reproducibility. To facilitate implementation and user interaction, we develop the FactSearch application featuring the proposed pipeline and the preliminary feedback on its performance.