Article reranking by memory-enhanced key sentence matching for detecting previously fact-checked claims

Abstract

False claims that have been previously fact-checked can still spread on social media. To mitigate their continual spread, detecting previously fact-checked claims is indispensable. Given a claim, existing works retrieve fact-checking articles (FC-articles) for detection and focus on reranking candidate articles in the typical two-stage retrieval framework. However, their performance may be limited as they ignore the following characteristics of FC-articles: (1) claims are often quoted to describe the checked events, providing lexical information besides semantics; and (2) sentence templates to introduce or debunk claims are common across articles, providing pattern information. In this paper, we propose a novel reranker, MTM (Memoryenhanced Transformers for Matching), to rank FC-articles using key sentences selected using event (lexical and semantic) and pattern information. For event information, we propose to finetune the Transformer with regression of ROUGE. For pattern information, we generate pattern vectors as a memory bank to match with the parts containing patterns. By fusing event and pattern information, we select key sentences to represent an article and then predict if the article fact-checks the given claim using the claim, key sentences, and patterns. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that MTM outperforms existing methods. Human evaluation proves that MTM can capture key sentences for explanations. The code and the dataset are at https://github.com/ICTMCG/MTM.