Fact checking is an essential task in journalism; its importance has been highlighted due to recently increased concerns and efforts in combating misinformation. In this paper, we present an automated fact-checking platform which given a claim, it retrieves relevant textual evidence from a document collection, predicts whether each piece of evidence supports or refutes the claim, and returns a final verdict. We describe the architecture of the system and the user interface, focusing on the choices made to improve its user-friendliness and transparency. We conduct a user study of the fact-checking platform in a journalistic setting: we integrated it with a collection of news articles and provide an evaluation of the platform using feedback from journalists in their workflow. We found that the predictions of our platform were correct 58\% of the time, and 59\% of the returned evidence was relevant.
@article{arxiv.1904.02037,
title = {Automated Fact Checking in the News Room},
author = {Sebastião Miranda and David Nogueira and Afonso Mendes and Andreas Vlachos and Andrew Secker and Rebecca Garrett and Jeff Mitchel and Zita Marinho},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.02037},
year = {2019}
}