To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.

com/

FactLLaMA: A Smart Model for Automated Fact-Checking

Introduction

Fact-checking is a crucial task for verifying the accuracy and reliability of

information, especially in the era of social media and fake news.
However, fact-checking is also a challenging task that requires complex
reasoning and external knowledge. How can we leverage the power of
natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to
automate fact-checking and make it more efficient and scalable?

FactLLaMA is a model developed by researchers at the Department of

Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic
University, Kowloon, Hong Kong. The model was developed with the
goal of optimizing instruction-following language models with external
knowledge for automated fact-checking. The motivation behind
developing FactLLaMA was to address the limitations of existing

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

instruction-following language models (IFLMs) for fact-checking. IFLMs

are models that can follow natural language instructions to perform
various tasks, such as answering questions, generating summaries, or
verifying facts. However, IFLMs often lack external knowledge and rely
on shallow heuristics to make decisions. For example, an IFLM may
verify a fact by simply matching keywords or phrases in the instruction
and the input text, without understanding the meaning or context of the
information.

What is FactLLaMA?

FactLLaMA is a model that uses external knowledge to optimize

instruction-following language models for automated fact-checking. The
model is designed to improve the accuracy of fact-checking by
incorporating external knowledge into the language model’s predictions.

Key Features of FactLLaMA

FactLLaMA has several key features that make it a novel and effective
model for automated fact-checking. Some of these features are:

● Instruction-following: FactLLaMA can follow natural language

instructions to perform fact-checking tasks. This makes it more
flexible and user-friendly than models that require fixed or
predefined formats or templates for input or output.
● External knowledge: FactLLaMA can leverage external
knowledge from factual statements extracted from reliable
sources. This makes it more knowledgeable and reliable than
models that rely on shallow heuristics or internal knowledge only.
● Adaptive attention: FactLLaMA can adaptively attend to different
types of external knowledge based on the instruction and the input
text. This makes it more attentive and selective than models that
use uniform or fixed attention mechanisms.

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

● Verdict and explanation: FactLLaMA can output a verdict (such

as “True” or “False”) and an explanation (such as “According to
Wikipedia, …”) for each fact-checking task. This makes it more
informative and transparent than models that output a verdict only
or an explanation only.

Capabilities/Use Case of FactLLaMA

FactLLaMA has many capabilities and use cases for automated

fact-checking. Some of these are:

● Social media fact-checking: FactLLaMA can verify facts from

social media posts, such as tweets, Facebook posts, or Instagram
captions. For example, given an instruction like “Verify if Elon Musk
tweeted that he will donate $6 billion to end world hunger” and an
input text like “Elon Musk tweeted on November 2, 2023: ‘If WFP
can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve
world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.’”,
FactLLaMA can output a verdict like “False” and an explanation
like “According to Snopes, Elon Musk did not tweet that he will
donate $6 billion to end world hunger, but rather he challenged the
World Food Programme (WFP) to prove how $6 billion can solve
world hunger”.
● News article fact-checking: FactLLaMA can verify facts from
news articles, such as headlines, summaries, or quotes. For
example, given an instruction like “Verify if the headline ‘China
launches world’s first quantum satellite’ is true” and an input text
like “China launches world’s first quantum satellite”, FactLLaMA
can output a verdict like “True” and an explanation like “According
to BBC News, China launched the world’s first quantum satellite in
August 2016, which aims to establish ‘hack-proof’ communications
between space and the ground”.

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

● Web page fact-checking: FactLLaMA can verify facts from web

pages, such as Wikipedia articles, product reviews, or personal
blogs. For example, given an instruction like “Verify if the Wikipedia
article ‘List of highest-grossing films’ is accurate” and an input text
like “The following is a list of the highest-grossing films of all time,
ranked by worldwide box office gross revenue adjusted for inflation
as of 2023”, FactLLaMA can output a verdict like “False” and an
explanation like “According to Box Office Mojo, the list of the
highest-grossing films of all time, ranked by worldwide box office
gross revenue adjusted for inflation as of 2023 is different from the
Wikipedia article. For example, the Wikipedia article ranks Avatar
(2009) as the highest-grossing film with $3.3 billion, while Box
Office Mojo ranks Gone with the Wind (1939) as the
highest-grossing film with $3.8 billion”.

By incorporating external knowledge into its predictions, FactLLaMA can

help to identify false or misleading information more accurately than
traditional fact-checking methods.

How does FactLLaMA work?

FactLLaMA is a model that incorporates external knowledge into

instruction-following language models to make more accurate
predictions about whether a given statement is true or false. The model’s
architecture includes components such as an instruction encoder, a
knowledge encoder, and a decoder.

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

source - https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2309/2309.00240.pdf

As shown in figure above, the methodology for instruct-tuning

FactLLaMA with external evidence for automatic fact-checking consists
of two key components: the generation of instruction-evidence-input
claim samples and the instruct-tuning of a generative pretrained
language model using these samples. The instruction-evidence-input
samples are generated by combining the instruction, evidence, and input
claim into a single sequence. The evidence is collected using the Google
API to retrieve relevant information from reputable sources. The factual
classification task is converted into a sequence-to-sequence problem
suitable for generative transformer models by framing it as text
generation for automatic fact-checking. The pretrained LLaMA model is
then instruct-tuned using the LORA algorithm, which aims to optimize
the model’s parameters to minimize a loss function that measures the
difference between the predicted fact-check results and the ground truth
of the training dataset.

Performance evaluation of FactLLaMA model

To evaluate the performance of FactLLaMA, researchers conducted

experiments on two widely used fact-checking datasets: RAWFC and
LIAR. The results demonstrate that the approach achieves
state-of-the-art performance in fact-checking tasks. The methods were
compared based on precision, recall, and F1-score, which are commonly
used metrics to assess the performance of classification tasks.

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

source - https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2309/2309.00240.pdf

As shown in table above for the RAWFC dataset, it can be observed that
traditional machine learning methods achieve moderate results, while
more advanced models outperform them. Interestingly, LLaMA without
tuning performs relatively poorly compared to the other methods.
However, when Instruct-tuning is applied, there is a significant
improvement in performance, particularly when external knowledge is
incorporated. Instruct-tuned LLaMA with external knowledge achieves
the highest F1-score, surpassing all other methods and demonstrating
the effectiveness of leveraging external evidence.

source - https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2309/2309.00240.pdf

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

Similar patterns can be observed on the evaluation on the LIAR dataset,

as shown in Table above. Once again, LLaMA without tuning performs
poorly, but instruct-tuning leads to substantial improvements.
Incorporating external knowledge in the instruct-tuning process further
enhances the performance, with LLaMA achieving the highest F1-score.

How to access and use this model?

FactLLaMA is a model that can be accessed and used through its

GitHub repository. The repository contains the official code of this paper.
The raw datasets used in the project can be downloaded from the
CofCED GitHub repository. To use the model, users can follow the
instructions provided in the repository to install the required packages
and run the code.

If you are interested to learn more about the FactLLaMA model, all
relevant links are provided under the 'source' section at the end of this
article.

Limitations

FactLLaMA is a novel and effective model for automated fact-checking,

but it also has some limitations and challenges that need to be
addressed in future work. Some of these are:

● Data quality: FactLLaMA relies on external knowledge from

factual statements extracted from reliable sources, but these
sources may not always be accurate or up-to-date. Therefore,
FactLLaMA may inherit these errors or inaccuracies from its
external knowledge sources and produce incorrect or inconsistent
outputs.
● Data coverage: FactLLaMA uses a large-scale dataset (CofCED)
that covers various topics and domains, but it may not cover all
possible facts or scenarios that may appear in real-world

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

fact-checking tasks. Therefore, FactLLaMA may lack external

knowledge or relevant factual statements for some fact-checking
tasks and produce vague or generic outputs.
● Data diversity: FactLLaMA uses a single type of external
knowledge (factual statements) for fact-checking tasks, but there
may be other types of external knowledge that can be useful or
informative for fact-checking. Therefore, FactLLaMA may benefit
from incorporating multiple types of external knowledge for
fact-checking tasks and producing more diverse and rich outputs.
● Model generalization: FactLLaMA is evaluated on two benchmark
datasets (RAWFC and LIAR) for fact-checking tasks, but it may not
generalize well to other datasets or domains that have different
formats, styles.

Conclusion

FactLLaMA is a powerful tool for improving the accuracy of automated

fact-checking. By incorporating external knowledge into
instruction-following language models, FactLLaMA offers a unique
approach to identifying false or misleading information online. With
continued development and research, FactLLaMA has the potential to
become an even more valuable tool for promoting truth and accuracy in
online content.

Source
research paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00240
research document - https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2309/2309.00240.pdf
project details - https://thcheung.github.io/factllama/
GitHub repo - https://github.com/thcheung/FactLLaMA
Raw dataset - https://github.com/Nicozwy/CofCED

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/