The advances in the digital era have led to rapid dissemination of information. This has also aggravated the spread of misinformation and disinformation. This has potentially serious consequences, such as civil unrest. While fact-checking aims to combat this, manual fact-checking is cumbersome and not scalable. While automated fact-checking approaches exist, they do not operate in real-time and do not always account for spread of misinformation through different modalities. This is particularly important as proactive fact-checking on live streams in real-time can help people be informed of false narratives and prevent catastrophic consequences that may cause civil unrest. This is particularly relevant with the rapid dissemination of information through video on social media platforms or other streams like political rallies and debates. Hence, in this work we develop a platform named LiveFC, that can aid in fact-checking live audio streams in real-time. LiveFC has a user-friendly interface that displays the claims detected along with their veracity and evidence for live streams with associated speakers for claims from respective segments.

The field of automated fact-checking increasingly depends on retrieving web-based evidence to determine the veracity of claims in real-world scenarios. A significant challenge in this process is not only retrieving relevant information, but also identifying evidence that can both support and refute complex claims. Traditional retrieval methods may return documents that directly address claims or lean toward supporting them, but often struggle with more complex claims requiring indirect reasoning. While some existing benchmarks and methods target retrieval for fact-checking, a comprehensive real-world open-domain benchmark has been lacking. In this paper, we present a real-world retrieval benchmark FactIR, derived from Factiverse production logs, enhanced with human annotations. We rigorously evaluate state-of-the-art retrieval models in a zero-shot setup on FactIR and offer insights for developing practical retrieval systems for fact-checking.

With the rapid advancement of neural language models, the deployment of overparameterized models has surged, increasing the need for interpretable explanations comprehensible to human inspectors. Existing post-hoc interpretability methods, which often focus on unigram features of single input textual instances, fail to capture the models’ decision-making process fully. Additionally, many methods do not differentiate between decisions based on spurious correlations and those based on a holistic understanding of the input. Our paper introduces DISCO, a novel method for discovering global, rule-based explanations by identifying causal n-gram associations with model predictions. This method employs a scalable sequence mining technique to extract relevant text spans from training data, associate them with model predictions, and conduct causality checks to distill robust rules that elucidate model behavior. These rules expose potential overfitting and provide insights into misleading feature combinations. We validate DISCO through extensive testing, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods in offering comprehensive insights into complex model behaviors. Our approach successfully identifies all shortcuts manually introduced into the training data (100% detection rate on the MultiRC dataset), resulting in an 18.8% regression in model performance—a capability unmatched by any other method. Furthermore, DISCO supports interactive explanations, enabling human inspectors to distinguish spurious causes in the rule-based output. This alleviates the burden of abundant instance-wise explanations and helps assess the model’s risk when encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) data.

With the growth of misinformation on the web, automated fact checking has garnered immense interest for detecting growing misinformation and disinformation. Current systems have made significant advancements in handling synthetic claims sourced from Wikipedia, and noteworthy progress has been achieved in addressing real-world claims that are verified by fact-checking organizations as well. We compile and release QuanTemp, a diverse, multi-domain dataset focused exclusively on numerical claims, encompassing comparative, statistical, interval, and temporal aspects, with detailed metadata and an accompanying evidence collection. This addresses the challenge of verifying real-world numerical claims, which are complex and often lack precise information, a gap not filled by existing works that mainly focus on synthetic claims. We evaluate and quantify these gaps in existing solutions for the task of verifying numerical claims. We also evaluate claim decomposition based methods, numerical understanding based natural language inference (NLI) models and our best baselines achieves a macro-F1 of 58.32. This demonstrates that QuanTemp serves as a challenging evaluation set for numerical claim verification.

An significant challenge in text-ranking systems is handling hard queries that form the tail end of the query distribution. Difficulty may arise due to the presence of uncommon, underspecified, or incomplete queries. In this work, we improve the ranking performance of hard or difficult queries while maintaining the performance of other queries. Firstly, we do LLM-based query enrichment for training queries using relevant documents. Next, a specialized ranker is fine-tuned only on the enriched hard queries instead of the original queries. We combine the relevance scores from the specialized ranker and the base ranker, along with a query performance score estimated for each query. Our approach departs from existing methods that usually employ a single ranker for all queries, which is biased towards easy queries, which form the majority of the query distribution. In our extensive experiments on the DL-Hard dataset, we find that a principled query performance based scoring method using base and specialized ranker offers a significant improvement of up to 48.4% on the document ranking task and up to 25% on the passage ranking task compared to the baseline performance of using original queries, even outperforming SOTA model.

We introduce SparCAssist, a general-purpose risk assessment tool for the machine learning models trained for language tasks. It evaluates models' risk by inspecting their behavior on counterfactuals, namely out-of-distribution instances generated based on the given data instance. The counterfactuals are generated by replacing tokens in rational subsequences identified by ExPred, while the replacements are retrieved using HotFlip or the Masked-Language-Model-based algorithms. The main purpose of our system is to help the human annotators to assess the model's risk on deployment. The counterfactual instances generated during the assessment are the by-product and can be used to train more robust NLP models in the future.

There has been significant progress in unsupervised network representation learning (UNRL) approaches over graphs recently with flexible random-walk approaches, new optimization objectives, and deep architectures. However, there is no common ground for systematic comparison of embeddings to understand their behavior for different graphs and tasks. We argue that most of the UNRL approaches either model and exploit neighborhood or what we call context information of a node. These methods largely differ in their definitions and exploitation of context. Consequently, we propose a framework that casts a variety of approaches-random walk based, matrix factorization and deep learning based-into a unified context-based optimization function. We systematically group the methods based on their similarities and differences. We study their differences which we later use to explain their performance differences (on downstream tasks). We conduct a large-scale empirical study considering nine popular and recent UNRL techniques and 11 real-world datasets with varying structural properties and two common tasks-node classification and link prediction. We find that for non-attributed graphs there is no single method that is a clear winner and that the choice of a suitable method is dictated by certain properties of the embedding methods, task and structural properties of the underlying graph. In addition, we also report the common pitfalls in evaluation of UNRL methods and come up with suggestions for experimental design and interpretation of results.