TwoWingOS: A Two-Wing Optimization Strategy for Evidential Claim Verification

Wenpeng Yin, Dan Roth


Abstract
Determining whether a given claim is supported by evidence is a fundamental NLP problem that is best modeled as Textual Entailment. However, given a large collection of text, finding evidence that could support or refute a given claim is a challenge in itself, amplified by the fact that different evidence might be needed to support or refute a claim. Nevertheless, most prior work decouples evidence finding from determining the truth value of the claim given the evidence. We propose to consider these two aspects jointly. We develop TwoWingOS (two-wing optimization strategy), a system that, while identifying appropriate evidence for a claim, also determines whether or not the claim is supported by the evidence. Given the claim, TwoWingOS attempts to identify a subset of the evidence candidates; given the predicted evidence, it then attempts to determine the truth value of the corresponding claim entailment problem. We treat this problem as coupled optimization problems, training a joint model for it. TwoWingOS offers two advantages: (i) Unlike pipeline systems it facilitates flexible-size evidence set, and (ii) Joint training improves both the claim entailment and the evidence identification. Experiments on a benchmark dataset show state-of-the-art performance.
Anthology ID:
D18-1010
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
105–114
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1010
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1010
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenpeng Yin and Dan Roth. 2018. TwoWingOS: A Two-Wing Optimization Strategy for Evidential Claim Verification. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 105–114, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TwoWingOS: A Two-Wing Optimization Strategy for Evidential Claim Verification (Yin & Roth, EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1010.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/D18-1010.mp4
Code
 yinwenpeng/FEVER
Data
FEVER