Papers › Check-COVID: Fact-Checking COVID-19 News Claims with Scientific Evidence

Check-COVID: Fact-Checking COVID-19 News Claims with Scientific Evidence

29 May 2023arXiv:2305.18265archive 2025-07-28

Gengyu Wang, Kate Harwood, Lawrence Chillrud, Amith Ananthram, Melanie Subbiah, Kathleen McKeown

We present a new fact-checking benchmark, Check-COVID, that requires systems to verify claims about COVID-19 from news using evidence from scientific articles. This approach to fact-checking is particularly challenging as it requires checking internet text written in everyday language against evidence from journal articles written in formal academic language. Check-COVID contains 1, 504 expert-annotated news claims about the coronavirus paired with sentence-level evidence from scientific journal articles and veracity labels. It includes both extracted (journalist-written) and composed (annotator-written) claims. Experiments using both a fact-checking specific system and GPT-3.5, which respectively achieve F1 scores of 76.99 and 69.90 on this task, reveal the difficulty of automatically fact-checking both claim types and the importance of in-domain data for good performance. Our data and models are released publicly at https://github.com/posuer/Check-COVID.

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posuer/check-covid officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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ArticlesFact CheckingSentence

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-3Layer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight Decay

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