Twowingos: A two-wing optimization strategy for evidential claim verification

Wenpeng Yin, Dan Roth

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

51 Scopus citations

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 identification 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. We treat this challenge 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 verification and the evidence identification. Experiments on a benchmark dataset show state-of-the-art performance.1

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018
EditorsEllen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun'ichi Tsujii
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Pages105-114
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781948087841
DOIs
StatePublished - 2018
Event2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018 - Brussels, Belgium
Duration: Oct 31 2018Nov 4 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018

Conference

Conference2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018
Country/TerritoryBelgium
CityBrussels
Period10/31/1811/4/18

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems

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