WikiCheck: An End-to-end Open Source Automatic Fact-Checking API based on Wikipedia

Abstract

With the growth of fake news and disinformation, the NLP community has been working to assist humans in fact-checking. However, most academic research has focused on model accuracy without paying attention to resource efficiency, which is crucial in real-life scenarios. In this work, we review the State-of-the-Art datasets and solutions for Automatic Fact-checking and test their applicability in production environments. We discover overfitting issues in those models, and we propose a data filtering method that improves the model's performance and generalization. Then, we design an unsupervised fine-tuning of the Masked Language models to improve its accuracy working with Wikipedia. We also propose a novel query enhancing method to improve evidence discovery using the Wikipedia Search API. Finally, we present a new fact-checking system, the WikiCheck API that automatically performs a facts validation process based on the Wikipedia knowledge base. It is comparable to SOTA solutions in terms of accuracy and can be used on low-memory CPU instances.