Detecting Check-Worthy Statements

Abstract

Detection of check-worthy statements is a subtask in the fact-checking process, automation of which would decrease time and burden needed to fact-check a statement. This master thesis proposes an approach that is focused on the classification of statements into check-worthy and not check-worthy, while also taking into account the context around a statement. For the purpose of this work, a dataset is constructed by consulting different fact-checking organizations. It contains debates and speeches in the domain of politics. Thus, even the ability of this approach is evaluated on this domain. The approach starts with extracting sentence-level and context features from the sentences, and further on with the classification of the sentences based on these features. The feature set and context features are chosen after several experiments, based on how well they differentiate check-worthy statements....