This repository contains code and data associated with the CLiC-it 2023 paper:

Giovanni Valer, Alan Ramponi and Sara Tonelli. 2023. When You Doubt, Abstain: A Study of Automated Fact-checking in Italian Under Domain Shift. In Proceedings of the Ninth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, Venice, Italy. CEUR.org. [cite] [paper]

To get started, clone this repository on your own path:

git clone https://github.com/jo-valer/fact-checking-ita-abstention.git

Create an environment with your own preferred package manager. We used python 3.9.13 and dependencies listed in requirements.txt. If you use conda, you can just run the following commands from the root of the project:

conda create --name fact-checking-ita-abstention python=3.9.13    # create the environment
conda activate fact-checking-ita-abstention                       # activate the environment
pip install --user -r requirements.txt                            # install the required packages

In the data/controlsets/ folder is the X-Fact dataset (Gupta and Srikumar, 2021) [repository], already filtered to contain examples in Italian only and without instances labeled as complicated. The resulting files are described below, using the notation introduced in the paper:

• train.tsv: TRAIN
• train_dev.tsv: TRAIN + DEV
• train_dev_id.tsv: TRAIN + DEV + TEST_id
• train_dev_id_ood.tsv: TRAIN + DEV + TEST_id + TEST_ood
• train_dev_ood.tsv: TRAIN + DEV + TEST_ood

In the data/testsets/ folder are the challenge test sets, annotated according to our claim ambiguity categorization (see the paper for more details). The columns news-like and social-like contain the rewritten versions of the original claim (i.e., column claim), whereas the ambiguity column indicates the ambiguity label for the claim. The files are the following:

• in_domain.tsv: in-domain test set (all genres: original, news-like, and social-like)
• out_of_domain.tsv: out-of-domain test set (all genres: original, news-like, and social-like)

Run the experiments in a controlled setup:

cd src
./experiments.sh . ../data/testsets/ ../data/controlsets/ 1     # in-domain test
./experiments.sh . ../data/testsets/ ../data/controlsets/ 3     # out-of-domain test

Run the experiments in a non-controlled setup:

cd src
./experiments.sh . ../data/testsets/ ../data/controlsets/ 0     # in-domain test
./experiments.sh . ../data/testsets/ ../data/controlsets/ 2     # out-of-domain test

The results are saved in the results/ folder.

If you use or build on top of this work, please cite our paper as follows:

@inproceedings{valer-etal-2023-when,
    title={When You Doubt, Abstain: {A} Study of Automated Fact-checking in {I}talian Under Domain Shift},
    author={Valer, Giovanni and Ramponi, Alan and Tonelli, Sara},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the 9th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics},
    publisher={CEUR-ws.org},
    year={2023},
    month={november},
    address={Venice, Italy}
}