iFACT: An Interactive Framework to Assess Claims from Tweets

Abstract

Posts by users on microblogs such as Twitter provide diverse real-time updates to major events. Unfortunately, not all the information are credible. Previous works that assess the credibility of information in Twitter have focused on extracting features from the Tweets. In this work, we present an interactive framework called iFACT for assessing the credibility of claims from tweets. The proposed framework collects independent evidence from web search results (WSR) and identify the dependencies between claims. It utilizes features from the search results to determine the probabilities that a claim is credible, not credible or inconclusive. Finally, the dependencies between claims are used to adjust the likelihood estimates of a claim being credible, not credible or inconclusive. iFACT allows users to be engaged in the credibility assessment process by providing feedback as to whether the web search results are relevant, support or contradict a claim. Experiment results on multiple real world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of WSR features and its ability to generalize to claims of new events. Case studies show the usefulness of claim dependencies and how the proposed approach can give explanation to the credibility assessment process.