Automated Fact Checking in the News Room

Sebastião Miranda, David Nogueira, Afonso Mendes, Andreas Vlachos, Andrew Secker, Rebecca Garrett, Jeff Mitchel, Zita Marinho
2019 The World Wide Web Conference on - WWW '19  
General rights This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: ABSTRACT 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
more » ... tion, 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 factchecking 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.
doi:10.1145/3308558.3314135 dblp:conf/www/MirandaNMVSGMM19 fatcat:5dr5dlqf5zfctfqopy5ivr6724