{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/missing-counter-evidence-renders-nlp-fact","title":"Missing Counter-Evidence Renders NLP Fact-Checking Unrealistic for Misinformation","arxiv_id":"2210.13865","date":"2022-10-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Max Glockner","Yufang Hou","Iryna Gurevych"],"abstract":"Misinformation emerges in times of uncertainty when credible information is limited. This is challenging for NLP-based fact-checking as it relies on counter-evidence, which may not yet be available. Despite increasing interest in automatic fact-checking, it is still unclear if automated approaches can realistically refute harmful real-world misinformation. Here, we contrast and compare NLP fact-checking with how professional fact-checkers combat misinformation in the absence of counter-evidence. In our analysis, we show that, by design, existing NLP task definitions for fact-checking cannot refute misinformation as professional fact-checkers do for the majority of claims. We then define two requirements that the evidence in datasets must fulfill for realistic fact-checking: It must be (1) sufficient to refute the claim and (2) not leaked from existing fact-checking articles. We survey existing fact-checking datasets and find that all of them fail to satisfy both criteria. Finally, we perform experiments to demonstrate that models trained on a large-scale fact-checking dataset rely on leaked evidence, which makes them unsuitable in real-world scenarios. Taken together, we show that current NLP fact-checking cannot realistically combat real-world misinformation because it depends on unrealistic assumptions about counter-evidence in the data.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13865v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.13865v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"missing-counter-evidence-renders-nlp-fact","repo_url":"https://github.com/ukplab/emnlp2022-missing-counter-evidence","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"articles","task_name":"Articles"},{"task_slug":"fact-checking","task_name":"Fact Checking"},{"task_slug":"misinformation","task_name":"Misinformation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"fail","method_name":"fail"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2210.13865","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2210.13865","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2210.13865"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/ukplab/emnlp2022-missing-counter-evidence","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_honours":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"9971899745459bad","entry":"create_claim_df","repo":"ukplab/emnlp2022-missing-counter-evidence","repo_kind":"official","path":"analyze-multifc.py","file_url":"https://github.com/ukplab/emnlp2022-missing-counter-evidence/blob/HEAD/analyze-multifc.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"9971899745459bad"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}