Tasks

Overview

The mission of the lab is to foster the development of technology that would enable the automatic verification of claims. Automated systems for claim identification and verification can be very useful as supportive technology for investigative journalism, as they could provide help and guidance, thus saving time.

A typical fact-checking system includes the following steps.

• 1. Automatically identify check-worthy claims

  2. Make sure they have not been fact-checked already by a reputable fact-checking organization

  3. Estimate the veracity of claims.

This lab is the fourth edition of the CheckThat! lab. In 2021, the lab turns its attention to social media - in particular to Twitter - as information posted on that platform is not checked by an authoritative entity before publication and such information tends to disseminate very quickly.

Tasks

Task 1 - Check-Worthiness Estimation : Given a claim, detect whether it is worth fact-checking.

Task 2 - Verified Claim Retrieval: Given a check-worthy claim, and a set of previously fact-checked claims, determine whether the claim has been previously fact-checked.

Task 3 - Fake News Detection: Given the text of a news article, determine whether the claims made in the article are true, partially true, false or other (e.g., claims in dispute) and also detect the topical domain of the article.

Past Editions

Information and datasets from past editions can be found here.