As online false information continues to grow, automated fact‐checking has gained an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Researchers in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) have contributed to the task by building fact‐checking datasets, devising automated fact‐checking pipelines and proposing NLP methods to further research in the development of different components. This article reviews relevant research on automated fact‐checking covering both the claim detection and claim validation components.

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As part of an automated fact-checking pipeline, the claim verification task consists in determining if a claim is supported by an associated piece of evidence. The complexity of gathering labelled claim-evidence pairs leads to a scarcity of datasets, particularly when dealing with new domains. In this article, we introduce Semantic Embedding Element-wise Difference (SEED), a novel vector-based method to few-shot claim verification that aggregates pairwise semantic differences for claim-evidence pairs. We build on the hypothesis that we can simulate class representative vectors that capture average semantic differences for claim-evidence pairs in a class, which can then be used for classification of new instances. We compare the performance of our method with competitive baselines including fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)/Robustly Optimized BERT Pre-training Approach (RoBERTa) models, as well as the state-of-the-art few-shot claim verification method that leverages language model perplexity. Experiments conducted on the Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) and SCIFACT datasets show consistent improvements over competitive baselines in few-shot settings. Our code is available.

Scientific claim verification is a unique challenge that is attracting increasing interest. The SCIVER shared task offers a benchmark scenario to test and compare claim verification approaches by participating teams and consists in three steps: relevant abstract selection, rationale selection and label prediction. In this paper, we present team QMUL-SDS's participation in the shared task. We propose an approach that performs scientific claim verification by doing binary classifications stepby-step. We trained a BioBERT-large classifier to select abstracts based on pairwise relevance assessments for each and continued to train it to select rationales out of each retrieved abstract based on . We then propose a two-step setting for label prediction, i.e. first predicting "NOT_ENOUGH_INFO" or "ENOUGH_INFO", then label those marked as "ENOUGH_INFO" as either "SUPPORT" or "CONTRADICT". Compared to the baseline system, we achieve substantial improvements on the dev set. As a result, our team is the No. 4 team on the leaderboard.