Explainable fact-checking plays a vital role in the fight against disinformation in today’s digital landscape. With the increasing volume of unverified content online, providing justifications for fact-checking has become essential to help users make informed decisions. While recent studies provide user-friendly explanations through abstractive or extractive summarization, they often assume the availability of human-written fact-checking articles, which is not always the case. This demo introduces SAFE, an argument-based framework designed to enhance both fact-checking and its justification. Specifically, SAFE offers three key features: i) producing argument-structured summaries of human-written fact-checking articles, ii) in the absence of human-written articles, generating structured summaries based on evidence retrieved from a corpus through a jointly trained summarization and evidence retrieval system, and iii) assessing the truthfulness of a claim by analyzing the structured summary.

Adrien Bibal, Rémi Cardon, David Alfter, Rodrigo Wilkens, Xiaoou Wang, Thomas François, Patrick Watrin. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2022.

In this paper, we present the FABRA: readability toolkit based on the aggregation of a large number of readability predictor variables. The toolkit is implemented as a service-oriented architecture, which obviates the need for installation, and simplifies its integration into other projects. We also perform a set of experiments to show which features are most predictive on two different corpora, and how the use of aggregators improves performance over standard feature-based readability prediction. Our experiments show that, for the explored corpora, the most important predictors for native texts are measures of lexical diversity, dependency counts and text coherence, while the most important predictors for foreign texts are syntactic variables illustrating language development, as well as features linked to lexical sophistication. FABRA: have the potential to support new research on readability assessment for French.