Fact or fiction: Verifying scientific claims

Abstract

We introduce scientific claim verification, a new task to select abstracts from the research literature containing evidence that SUPPORTS or REFUTES a given scientific claim, and to identify rationales justifying each decision. To study this task, we construct SCIFACT, a dataset of 1.4K expert-written scientific claims paired with evidence-containing abstracts annotated with labels and rationales. We develop baseline models for SCIFACT, and demonstrate that simple domain adaptation techniques substantially improve performance compared to models trained on Wikipedia or political news. We show that our system is able to verify claims related to COVID-19 by identifying evidence from the CORD-19 corpus. Our experiments indicate that SCIFACT will provide a challenging testbed for the development of new systems designed to retrieve and reason over corpora containing specialized domain knowledge. Data and code for this new task are publicly available at https://github.com/allenai/scifact. A leader-board and COVID-19 fact-checking demo are available at https://scifact.apps.allenai.org.