In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in claim detection as an important building block for misinformation detection. This involves detecting more fine-grained attributes relating to the claim, such as the claimer, claim topic, claim object pertaining to the topic, etc. Yet, a notable bottleneck of existing claim detection approaches is their portability to emerging events and low-resource training data settings. In this regard, we propose a fine-grained claim detection framework that leverages zero-shot Question Answering (QA) using directed questions to solve a diverse set of sub-tasks such as topic filtering, claim object detection, and claimer detection. We show that our approach significantly outperforms various zero-shot, few-shot and task-specific baselines on the NewsClaims benchmark (Reddy et al., 2021).

Revanth Gangi Reddy, Sai Chetan Chinthakindi, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi Fung, Kathryn Conger, Ahmed ELsayed, Martha Palmer, Preslav Nakov, Eduard Hovy, Kevin Small, Heng Ji. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2022.

A common approach in many machine learning algorithms involves self-supervised learning on large unlabeled data before fine-tuning on downstream tasks to further improve performance.A new approach for language modelling, called dynamic evaluation, further fine-tunes a trained model during inference using trivially-present ground-truth labels, giving a large improvement in performance.However, this approach does not easily extend to classification tasks, where ground-truth labels are absent during inference.We propose to solve this issue by utilizing self-training and back-propagating the loss from the model's own class-balanced predictions (pseudo-labels), adapting the Reptile algorithm from meta-learning, combined with an inductive bias towards pre-trained weights to improve generalization.Our method improves the performance of standard backbones such as BERT, Electra, and ResNet-50 on a wide variety of tasks, such as question answering on SQuAD and NewsQA, benchmark task SuperGLUE, conversation response selection on Ubuntu Dialog corpus v2.0, as well as image classification on MNIST and ImageNet without any changes to the underlying models.Our proposed method outperforms previous approaches, enables self-supervised finetuning during inference of any classifier model to better adapt to target domains, can be easily adapted to any model, and is also effective in online and transfer-learning settings.