Re-ranking web search results for better fact-checking: A preliminary study

Abstract

Even though Web search engines play an important role in finding documents relevant to user queries, there is little to no attention given to how they perform in terms of usefulness for fact-checking claims. In this paper, we introduce a new research problem that addresses the ability of fact-checking systems to distinguish Web search results that are useful in discovering the veracity of claims from the ones that are not. We also propose a re-ranking method to improve ranking of search results for fact-checking. To evaluate our proposed method, we conducted a preliminary study for which we have developed a test collection that includes 22 claims and 20 manually-annotated Web search results for each. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline represented by the original ranking of search results. The contributions this improvement brings to real-world applications is two-fold: it will help human fact-checkers find useful documents for their task faster, and it will help automated fact-checking systems by pointing out which documents are useful and which are not.