Automated Historical Fact-Checking by Passage Retrieval, Word Statistics, and Virtual Question-Answering

This paper presents a hybrid approach to the verification of statements about historical facts. The test data was collected from the world history examinations in a standardized achievement test for high school students. The data includes various kinds of false statements that were carefully written so as to deceive the students while they can be disproven on the basis of the teaching materials. Our system predicts the truth or falsehood of a statement based on text search, word cooccurrence statistics, factoid-style question answering, and temporal relation recognition. These features contribute to the judgement complementarily and achieved the state-of-the-art accuracy.