Factual Error Correction of Claims

12/31/2020

∙

by   James Thorne, et al.

∙

0

∙

share

This paper introduces the task of factual error correction: performing edits to a claim so that the generated rewrite is supported by evidence. This serves two purposes: firstly this provides a mechanism to correct written texts that contain misinformation, and secondly, this acts as an inherent explanation for claims already partially supported by evidence. We demonstrate that factual error correction is possible without the need for any additional training data using distant-supervision and retrieved evidence. We release a dataset of 65,000 instances, based on a recent fact verification dataset, to compare our distantly-supervised method to a fully supervised ceiling system. Our manual evaluation indicates which automated evaluation metrics best correlate with human judgements of factuality and whether errors were actually corrected.