Time-aware evidence ranking for fact-checking

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Truth can vary over time. Fact-checking decisions on claim veracity should therefore take into account temporal information of both the claim and supporting or refuting evidence. In this work, we investigate the hypothesis that the timestamp of a Web page is crucial to how it should be ranked for a given claim. We delineate four temporal ranking methods that constrain evidence ranking differently and simulate hypothesis-specific evidence rankings given the evidence timestamps as gold standard. Evidence ranking in three fact-checking models is ultimately optimized using a learning-to-rank loss function. Our study reveals that time-aware evidence ranking not only surpasses relevance assumptions based purely on semantic similarity or position in a search results list, but also improves veracity predictions of time-sensitive claims in particular.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100663
JournalJournal of Web Semantics
Volume71
Number of pages14
ISSN1570-8268
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s)

    Research areas

  • Automated fact-checking, Document ranking, Learning to rank, Temporal relevance, Temporal semantics

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