Overview of the CLEF-2021 CheckThat! Lab Task 2 on detecting previously fact-checked claims in tweets and political debates

Shaden Shaar*, Fatima Haouari, Watheq Mansour, Maram Hasanain, Nikolay Babulkov, Firoj Alam, Giovanni da San Martino, Tamer Elsayed, Preslav Nakov

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We describe the fourth edition of the CheckThat! Lab, part of the 2021 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The lab evaluates technology supporting three tasks related to factuality, and it covers Arabic, Bulgarian, English, Spanish, and Turkish. Here, we present the task 2, which asks to detect previously fact-checked claims (in two languages). A total of four teams participated in this task, submitted a total of sixteen runs, and most submissions managed to achieve sizable improvements over the baselines using transformer based models such as BERT, RoBERTa. In this paper, we describe the process of data collection and the task setup, including the evaluation measures used, and we give a brief overview of the participating systems. Last but not least, we release to the research community all datasets from the lab as well as the evaluation scripts, which should enable further research in detecting previously fact-checked claims.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)393-405
Number of pages13
JournalCEUR Workshop Proceedings
Volume2936
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event22nd Working Notes of CLEF - Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, CLEF-WN 2021 - Virtual, Online, Romania
Duration: 21 Sept 202124 Sept 2021

Keywords

  • COVID-19
  • Check-worthiness estimation
  • Computational journalism
  • Detecting previously fact-checked claims
  • Fact-checking
  • Social media verification
  • Veracity
  • Verified claims retrieval

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