Check It Out : Politics and Neural Networks

The task of fact-checking has been formalised as the assessment of the truthfulness of a claim. Be it a political proclamation or a technological development, verification of a new tidbit of information before its propagation to the general public is of utmost importance. Failing to do so leads to the spread of misinformation, which is a devious tool. Fact-checking is commonly performed by journalists, manually looking up information pertaining to the statement in question. This is a drawn out and tedious process with a chance of the concerned person not covering the domain exhaustively. Some of this effort is reduced by the use of knowledge bases created over a period of time. In this work under Task 2 (Factuality) of the CLEF 2018 CheckThat! Lab, we detail a neural network based methodology which models the textual data of a claim based on various representations of its words and characters. An affixed attention mechanism allows us to encapsulate linguistic features common in false claims. We achieve an accuracy of 39.57% on the task dataset.