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It Takes Nine to Smell a Rat: Neural Multi-Task Learning for Check-Worthiness Prediction

Computation and Language 2019-08-22 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We propose a multi-task deep-learning approach for estimating the check-worthiness of claims in political debates. Given a political debate, such as the 2016 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential ones, the task is to predict which statements in the debate should be prioritized for fact-checking. While different fact-checking organizations would naturally make different choices when analyzing the same debate, we show that it pays to learn from multiple sources simultaneously (PolitiFact, FactCheck, ABC, CNN, NPR, NYT, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and Washington Post) in a multi-task learning setup, even when a particular source is chosen as a target to imitate. Our evaluation shows state-of-the-art results on a standard dataset for the task of check-worthiness prediction.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.07912,
  title  = {It Takes Nine to Smell a Rat: Neural Multi-Task Learning for Check-Worthiness Prediction},
  author = {Slavena Vasileva and Pepa Atanasova and Lluís Màrquez and Alberto Barrón-Cedeño and Preslav Nakov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.07912},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Check-worthiness; Fact-Checking; Veracity; Multi-task Learning; Neural Networks. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1908.01328

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:53:17.927Z