ClaimVerif: A real-time claim verification system using the web and fact databases

Our society is increasingly digitalized. Every day, a tremendous amount of information is being created, shared, and digested through all kinds of cyber channels. Although people can easily acquire information from various sources (social media, news articles, etc.) the truthfulness of most received information remains unverified. In many real-life scenarios, false information has become the de facto cause that leads to detrimental decision makings, and techniques that can automatically filter false information are highly demanded. However, verifying whether a piece of information is trustworthy is difficult because: (1) selecting candidate snippets for fact checking is nontrivial; and (2) detecting supporting evidences i.e. stances, suffers from the difficulty of measuring the similarity between claims and related evidences. We build ClaimVerif, a claim verification system that not only provides credibility assessment for any user-given query claim, but also rationales the assessment results with supporting evidences. ClaimVerif can automatically select the stances from millions of documents and employs two-step training to justify the opinions of the stances. Furthermore, combined with the credibility of stances sources, ClaimVerif degrades the score of stances from untrustworthy sources and alleviates the negative effects from rumor spreaders. Our empirical evaluations show that ClaimVerif achieves both high accuracy and efficiency in different claim verification tasks. It can be highly useful in practical applications by providing multidimension analysis for the suspicious statements, including the stances, opinions, source credibility and estimated judgements.