Pipeline and Dataset Generation for Automated Fact-checking in Almost
  Any Language
Jan Drchal Herbert Ullrich Tomáš Mlynář Václav Moravec
This article presents a pipeline for automated fact-checking leveraging
publicly available Language Models and data. The objective is to assess the
accuracy of textual claims using evidence from a ground-truth evidence corpus.
The pipeline consists of two main modules -- the evidence retrieval and the
claim veracity evaluation. Our primary focus is on the ease of deployment in
various languages that remain unexplored in the field of automated
fact-checking. Unlike most similar pipelines, which work with evidence
sentences, our pipeline processes data on a paragraph level, simplifying the
overall architecture and data requirements. Given the high cost of annotating
language-specific fact-checking training data, our solution builds on the
Question Answering for Claim Generation (QACG) method, which we adapt and use
to generate the data for all models of the pipeline. Our strategy enables the
introduction of new languages through machine translation of only two fixed
datasets of moderate size. Subsequently, any number of training samples can be
generated based on an evidence corpus in the target language. We provide open
access to all data and fine-tuned models for Czech, English, Polish, and Slovak
pipelines, as well as to our codebase that may be used to reproduce the
results.We comprehensively evaluate the pipelines for all four languages,
including human annotations and per-sample difficulty assessment using
Pointwise V-information. The presented experiments are based on full Wikipedia
snapshots to promote reproducibility. To facilitate implementation and user
interaction, we develop the FactSearch application featuring the proposed
pipeline and the preliminary feedback on its performance.