The rapid dissemination of misinformation through social media increased the importance of automated fact-checking. Furthermore, studies on what deep neural models pay attention to when making predictions have increased in recent years. While significant progress has been made in this field, it has not yet reached a level of reasoning comparable to human reasoning. To address these gaps, we propose a multi-task explainable neural model for misinformation detection. Specifically, this work formulates an explanation generation process of the model's veracity prediction as a text summarization problem. Additionally, the performance of the proposed model is discussed on publicly available datasets and the findings are evaluated with related studies.

Justification is an explanation that supports the veracity assigned to a claim in fact-checking. However, the task of justification generation is previously oversimplified as summarization of fact-check article authored by fact-checkers. Therefore, we propose a realistic approach to generate justification based on retrieved evidence. We present a new benchmark dataset called ExClaim for \underline{Ex}plainable fact-checking of real-world \underline{Claim}s, and introduce JustiLM, a novel few-shot \underline{Justi}fication generation based on retrieval-augmented \underline{L}anguage \underline{M}odel by using fact-check articles as auxiliary resource during training only. Experiments show that JustiLM achieves promising performance in justification generation compared to strong baselines, and can also enhance veracity classification with a straightforward extension.

Existing fake news detection methods aim to classify a piece of news as true or false and provide veracity explanations, achieving remarkable performances. However, they often tailor automated solutions on manual fact-checked reports, suffering from limited news coverage and debunking delays. When a piece of news has not yet been fact-checked or debunked, certain amounts of relevant raw reports are usually disseminated on various media outlets, containing the wisdom of crowds to verify the news claim and explain its verdict. In this paper, we propose a novel Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation (CofCED) neural network for explainable fake news detection based on such raw reports, alleviating the dependency on fact-checked ones. Specifically, we first utilize a hierarchical encoder for web text representation, and then develop two cascaded selectors to select the most explainable sentences for verdicts on top of the selected top-K reports in a coarse-to-fine manner. Besides, we construct two explainable fake news datasets, which are publicly available. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and generates high-quality explanations from diverse evaluation perspectives.

A number of exciting advances have been made in automated fact-checking thanks to increasingly larger datasets and more powerful systems, leading to improvements in the complexity of claims which can be accurately fact-checked. However, despite these advances, there are still desirable functionalities missing from the fact-checking pipeline. In this survey, we focus on the explanation functionality -- that is fact-checking systems providing reasons for their predictions. We summarize existing methods for explaining the predictions of fact-checking systems and we explore trends in this topic. Further, we consider what makes for good explanations in this specific domain through a comparative analysis of existing fact-checking explanations against some desirable properties. Finally, we propose further research directions for generating fact-checking explanations, and describe how these may lead to improvements in the research area.