AnswerFact: Fact checking in product question answering

• Main Authors: ZHANG, Wenxuan, DENG, Yang, MA, Jing, LAM, Wai
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: Databases and Information Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/9153; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/10156/viewcontent/2020.emnlp_main.188.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Product-related question answering platforms nowadays are widely employed in many E-commerce sites, providing a convenient way for potential customers to address their concerns during online shopping. However, the misinformation in the answers on those platforms poses unprecedented challenges for users to obtain reliable and truthful product information, which may even cause a commercial loss in E-commerce business. To tackle this issue, we investigate to predict the veracity of answers in this paper and introduce AnswerFact, a large scale fact checking dataset from product question answering forums. Each answer is accompanied by its veracity label and associated evidence sentences, providing a valuable testbed for evidence-based fact checking tasks in QA settings. We further propose a novel neural model with tailored evidence ranking components to handle the concerned answer veracity prediction problem. Extensive experiments are conducted with our proposed model and various existing fact checking methods, showing that our method outperforms all baselines on this task.