The Automated Verification of Textual Claims (AVeriTeC) shared task asks participants to retrieve evidence and predict veracity for real-world claims checked by fact-checkers. Evidence can be found either via a search engine, or via a knowledge store provided by the organisers. Submissions are evaluated using AVeriTeC score, which considers a claim to be accurately verified if and only if both the verdict is correct and retrieved evidence is considered to meet a certain quality threshold. The shared task received 21 submissions, 18 of which surpassed our baseline. The winning team was TUDA_MAI with an AVeriTeC score of 63%. In this paper we describe the shared task, present the full results, and highlight key takeaways from the shared task.

This chapter provides an overview of research works that present approaches with some degree of cross-fertilisation between Computational Argumentation and Machine Learning. Our review of the literature identified two broad themes representing the purpose of the interaction between these two areas: argumentation for machine learning and machine learning for argumentation. Across these two themes, we systematically evaluate the spectrum of works across various dimensions, including the type of learning and the form of argumentation framework used. Further, we identify three types of interaction between these two areas: synergistic approaches, where the Argumentation and Machine Learning components are tightly integrated; segmented approaches, where the two are interleaved such that the outputs of one are the inputs of the other; and approximated approaches, where one component shadows the other at a chosen level of detail. We draw conclusions about the suitability of certain forms of Argumentation for supporting certain types of Machine Learning, and vice versa, with clear patterns emerging from the review. Whilst the reviewed works provide inspiration for successfully combining the two fields of research, we also identify and discuss limitations and challenges that ought to be addressed in order to ensure that they remain a fruitful pairing as AI advances.

We argue that enabling human-AI dialogue, purposed to support joint reasoning (i.e., 'inquiry'), is important for ensuring that AI decision making is aligned with human values and preferences. In particular, we point to logic-based models of argumentation and dialogue, and suggest that the traditional focus on persuasion dialogues be replaced by a focus on inquiry dialogues, and the distinct challenges that joint inquiry raises. Given recent dramatic advances in the performance of large language models (LLMs), and the anticipated increase in their use for decision making, we provide a roadmap for research into inquiry dialogues for supporting joint human-LLM reasoning tasks that are ethically salient, and that thereby require that decisions are value aligned.

Numbers are crucial for various real-world domains such as finance, economics, and science. Thus, understanding and reasoning with numbers are essential skills for language models to solve different tasks. While different numerical benchmarks have been introduced in recent years, they are limited to specific numerical aspects mostly. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical taxonomy for numerical reasoning skills with more than ten reasoning types across four levels: representation, number sense, manipulation, and complex reasoning. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models to identify reasoning challenges specific to them. Henceforth, we develop a diverse set of numerical probes employing a semi-automated approach. We focus on the tabular Natural Language Inference (TNLI) task as a case study and measure models' performance shifts. Our results show that no model consistently excels across all numerical reasoning types. Among the probed models, FlanT5 (few-/zero-shot) and GPT-3.5 (few-shot) demonstrate strong overall numerical reasoning skills compared to other models. Label-flipping probes indicate that models often exploit dataset artifacts to predict the correct labels.

As algorithmic decision-making systems become more prevalent in society, ensuring the fairness of these systems is becoming increasingly important. Whilst there has been substantial research in building fair algorithmic decision-making systems, the majority of these methods require access to the training data, including personal characteristics, and are not transparent regarding which individuals are classified unfairly. In this paper, we propose a novel model-agnostic argumentation-based method to determine why an individual is classified differently in comparison to similar individuals. Our method uses a quantitative argumentation framework to represent attribute-value pairs of an individual and of those similar to them, and uses a well-known semantics to identify the attribute-value pairs in the individual contributing most to their different classification. We evaluate our method on two datasets commonly used in the fairness literature and illustrate its effectiveness in the identification of bias.

Bias mitigation methods for binary classification decision-making systems have been widely researched due to the ever-growing importance of designing fair machine learning processes that are impartial and do not discriminate against individuals or groups based on protected personal characteristics. In this paper, we present a structured overview of the research landscape for bias mitigation methods, report on their benefits and limitations, and provide recommendations for the development of future bias mitigation methods for binary classification.

Evidence data for automated fact-checking (AFC) can be in multiple modalities such as text, tables, images, audio, or video. While there is increasing interest in using images for AFC, previous works mostly focus on detecting manipulated or fake images. We propose a novel task, chart-based fact-checking, and introduce ChartBERT as the first model for AFC against chart evidence. ChartBERT leverages textual, structural and visual information of charts to determine the veracity of textual claims. For evaluation, we create ChartFC, a new dataset of 15, 886 charts. We systematically evaluate 75 different vision-language (VL) baselines and show that ChartBERT outperforms VL models, achieving 63.8% accuracy. Our results suggest that the task is complex yet feasible, with many challenges ahead.

Argument Mining is the research area which aims at extracting argument components and predicting argumentative relations (i.e., support and attack) from text. In particular, numerous approaches have been proposed in the literature to predict the relations holding between the arguments, and application-specific annotated resources were built for this purpose. Despite the fact that these resources have been created to experiment on the same task, the definition of a single relation prediction method to be successfully applied to a significant portion of these datasets is an open research problem in Argument Mining. This means that none of the methods proposed in the literature can be easily ported from one resource to another. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a set of dataset independent strong neural baselines which obtain homogeneous results on all the datasets proposed in the literature for the argumentative relation prediction task. Thus, our baselines can be employed by the Argument Mining community to compare more effectively how well a method performs on the argumentative relation prediction task.