Truth-Seeking in the Post-Truth Era: Tutorial at EMNLP 2020

The obvious method is to cross-reference a claim with existing facts to verify whether that claim is true. This is accurate and highly explainable, but it also comes at some significant costs. Not only does it assume that the claim is checkable (e.g., what if a world leader decided to say "the entire universe was created last Thursday"), but it also requires a huge database of evidence because the AI needs sufficient evidence on so many different areas in order to be able to verify an acceptable proportion of claims. The alternate method is to use the context of a claim to try to make an assumption on whether or not it's true. For example, if the claim was made by The Onion, we could probably assume it's not true.