Fact-Checking Meets Fauxtography: Verifying Claims About Images

Dimitrina Zlatkova, Preslav Nakov, Ivan Koychev


Abstract
The recent explosion of false claims in social media and on the Web in general has given rise to a lot of manual fact-checking initiatives. Unfortunately, the number of claims that need to be fact-checked is several orders of magnitude larger than what humans can handle manually. Thus, there has been a lot of research aiming at automating the process. Interestingly, previous work has largely ignored the growing number of claims about images. This is despite the fact that visual imagery is more influential than text and naturally appears alongside fake news. Here we aim at bridging this gap. In particular, we create a new dataset for this problem, and we explore a variety of features modeling the claim, the image, and the relationship between the claim and the image. The evaluation results show sizable improvements over the baseline. We release our dataset, hoping to enable further research on fact-checking claims about images.
Anthology ID:
D19-1216
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2099–2108
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1216
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1216
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dimitrina Zlatkova, Preslav Nakov, and Ivan Koychev. 2019. Fact-Checking Meets Fauxtography: Verifying Claims About Images. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2099–2108, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fact-Checking Meets Fauxtography: Verifying Claims About Images (Zlatkova et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1216.pdf
Code
 didizlatkova/fake-image-detection