Papers › What to Fact-Check: Guiding Check-Worthy Information Detection in News Articles...

What to Fact-Check: Guiding Check-Worthy Information Detection in News Articles through Argumentative Discourse Structure

1 Jul 2021SIGDIAL (ACL) 2021 7archive 2025-07-28

Tariq Alhindi, Brennan McManus, Smaranda Muresan

Most existing methods for automatic fact-checking start with a precompiled list of claims to verify. We investigate the understudied problem of determining what statements in news articles are worthy to fact-check. We annotate the argument structure of 95 news articles in the climate change domain that are fact-checked by climate scientists at climatefeedback.org. We release the first multi-layer annotated corpus for both argumentative discourse structure (argument types and relations) and for fact-checked statements in news articles. We discuss the connection between argument structure and check-worthy statements and develop several baseline models for detecting check-worthy statements in the climate change domain. Our preliminary results show that using information about argumentative discourse structure shows slight but statistically significant improvement over a baseline of local discourse structure.

PaperPDFCode

Code

tariq60/whattofactcheck officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

ArticlesFact Checking

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections