Beyond True or False: Retrieval-Augmented Hierarchical Analysis of Nuanced Claims
Abstract: Claims made by individuals or entities are oftentimes nuanced and cannot be clearly labeled as entirely "true" or "false"---as is frequently the case with scientific and political claims. However, a claim (e.g., "vaccine A is better than vaccine B") can be dissected into its integral aspects and sub-aspects (e.g., efficacy, safety, distribution), which are individually easier to validate. This enables a more comprehensive, structured response that provides a well-rounded perspective on a given problem while also allowing the reader to prioritize specific angles of interest within the claim (e.g., safety towards children). Thus, we propose ClaimSpect, a retrieval-augmented generation-based framework for automatically constructing a hierarchy of aspects typically considered when addressing a claim and enriching them with corpus-specific perspectives. This structure hierarchically partitions an input corpus to retrieve relevant segments, which assist in discovering new sub-aspects. Moreover, these segments enable the discovery of varying perspectives towards an aspect of the claim (e.g., support, neutral, or oppose) and their respective prevalence (e.g., "how many biomedical papers believe vaccine A is more transportable than B?"). We apply ClaimSpect to a wide variety of real-world scientific and political claims featured in our constructed dataset, showcasing its robustness and accuracy in deconstructing a nuanced claim and representing perspectives within a corpus. Through real-world case studies and human evaluation, we validate its effectiveness over multiple baselines.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: NLP Applications
Research Area Keywords: fact checking,rumor/misinformation detection,re-ranking
Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models, Data resources, Data analysis
Languages Studied: English
Submission Number: 6858
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