CsFEVER and CTKFacts: acquiring Czech data for fact verification

In this paper, we examine several methods of acquiring Czech data for automated fact-checking, which is a task commonly modeled as a classification of textual claim veracity w.r.t. a corpus of trusted ground truths. We attempt to collect sets of data in form of a factual claim, evidence within the ground truth corpus, and its veracity label (supported, refuted or not enough info). As a first attempt, we generate a Czech version of the large-scale FEVER dataset built on top of Wikipedia corpus. We take a hybrid approach of machine translation and document alignment; the approach and the tools we provide can be easily applied to other languages. We discuss its weaknesses, propose a future strategy for their mitigation and publish the 127k resulting translations, as well as a version of such dataset reliably applicable for the Natural Language Inference task—the CsFEVER-NLI. Furthermore, we collect a novel dataset of 3,097 claims, which is annotated using the corpus of 2.2 M articles of Czech News Agency. We present an extended dataset annotation methodology based on the FEVER approach, and, as the underlying corpus is proprietary, we also publish a standalone version of the dataset for the task of Natural Language Inference we call CTKFactsNLI. We analyze both acquired datasets for spurious cues—annotation patterns leading to model overfitting. CTKFacts is further examined for inter-annotator agreement, thoroughly cleaned, and a typology of common annotator errors is extracted. Finally, we provide baseline models for all stages of the fact-checking pipeline and publish the NLI datasets, as well as our annotation platform and other experimental data.