FacTeR-Check: Semi-automated fact-checking through semantic similarity and natural language inference

Abstract

Our society produces and shares overwhelming amounts of information through Online Social Networks (OSNs). Within this environment, misinformation and disinformation have proliferated, becoming a public safety concern in most countries. Allowing the public and professionals to efficiently find reliable evidence about the factual veracity of a claim is a crucial step to mitigate this harmful spread. To this end, we propose FacTeR-Check, a multilingual architecture for semi-automated fact-checking and hoaxes propagation analysis that can be used to implement applications designed for both the general public and for fact-checking organisations. FacTeR-Check implements three different modules relying on the XLM-RoBERTa Transformer architecture to evaluate semantic similarity, to calculate natural language inference and to build search queries through automatic keywords extraction and Named-Entity Recognition. The three modules have been validated using state-of-the-art benchmark datasets, exhibiting good performance in all of them. Besides, FacTeR-Check is employed to collect and label a dataset, called NLI19-SP, composed of more than 40,000 tweets supporting or denying 60 hoaxes related to COVID-19, released publicly. Finally, an analysis of the data collected in this dataset is provided, which allows to obtain a deep insight of how disinformation operated during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spanish-speaking countries.