Journal Article: “Studying Effectiveness of Web Search For Fact Checking”
The article linked below was recently published by the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST).
Title
Studying Effectiveness of Web Search For Fact Checking
Authors
Maram Hasanain
Qatar University
Tamer Elsayed
Qatar University
Source
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST)
First Published: October 14, 2021
DOI: 10.1002/asi.24577
Abstract
Web search is commonly used by fact checking systems as a source of evidence for claim verification. In this work, we demonstrate that the task of retrieving pages useful for fact checking, called evidential pages, is indeed different from the task of retrieving topically relevant pages that are typically optimized by search engines; thus, it should be handled differently. We conduct a comprehensive study on the performance of retrieving evidential pages over a test collection we developed for the task of re-ranking Web pages by usefulness for fact-checking. Results show that pages (retrieved by a commercial search engine) that are topically relevant to a claim are not always useful for verifying it, and that the engine’s performance in retrieving evidential pages is weakly correlated with retrieval of topically relevant pages. Additionally, we identify types of evidence in evidential pages and some linguistic cues that can help predict page usefulness. Moreover, preliminary experiments show that a retrieval model leveraging those cues has a higher performance compared to the search engine. Finally, we show that existing systems have a long way to go to support effective fact checking. To that end, our work provides insights to guide design of better future systems for the task.
Direct to Full Text Article
Filed under: News

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.