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A Retrospective Analysis of the Fake News Challenge Stance-Detection Task

Andreas Hanselowski, Avinesh PVS, Benjamin Schiller, Felix Caspelherr, Debanjan Chaudhuri, Christian M. Meyer, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
The 2017 Fake News Challenge Stage 1 (FNC-1) shared task addressed a stance classification task as a crucial first step towards detecting fake news. To date, there is no in-depth analysis paper to critically discuss FNC-1’s experimental setup, reproduce the results, and draw conclusions for next-generation stance classification methods. In this paper, we provide such an in-depth analysis for the three top-performing systems. We first find that FNC-1’s proposed evaluation metric favors the majority class, which can be easily classified, and thus overestimates the true discriminative power of the methods. Therefore, we propose a new F1-based metric yielding a changed system ranking. Next, we compare the features and architectures used, which leads to a novel feature-rich stacked LSTM model that performs on par with the best systems, but is superior in predicting minority classes. To understand the methods’ ability to generalize, we derive a new dataset and perform both in-domain and cross-domain experiments. Our qualitative and quantitative study helps interpreting the original FNC-1 scores and understand which features help improving performance and why. Our new dataset and all source code used during the reproduction study are publicly available for future research.
Anthology ID:
C18-1158
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1859–1874
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1158
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andreas Hanselowski, Avinesh PVS, Benjamin Schiller, Felix Caspelherr, Debanjan Chaudhuri, Christian M. Meyer, and Iryna Gurevych. 2018. A Retrospective Analysis of the Fake News Challenge Stance-Detection Task. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1859–1874, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Retrospective Analysis of the Fake News Challenge Stance-Detection Task (Hanselowski et al., COLING 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1158.pdf
Code
 UKPLab/coling2018_fake-news-challenge
Data
FNC-1