aedFaCT: Scientific Fact-Checking Made Easier via Semi-Automatic Discovery of Relevant Expert Opinions
Enes Altuncu, Jason R. C. Nurse, Meryem Bagriacik, Sophie Kaleba, Haiyue Yuan, Lisa Bonheme, Shujun Li
TL;DR
The paper addresses the challenge of fake news by proposing aedFaCT, a web browser extension that semi-automatically discovers expert opinions and scientific evidence relevant to a news article through keyword-driven searches. It integrates three components—keyword extraction, expert-opinion discovery from credible outlets, and literature-based evidence retrieval from Scopus—to support veracity assessment by both professionals and lay readers. An initial pilot with three non-participant testers suggests faster fact-checking without compromising evidence quality, underscoring the practical value of integrating expert perspectives into online verification workflows. The work highlights open-source availability and outlines future enhancements, aiming to broaden data sources, improve claim-detection focus, and scale the approach to real-world use while emphasizing user-critical evaluation of expert viewpoints.
Abstract
In this highly digitised world, fake news is a challenging problem that can cause serious harm to society. Considering how fast fake news can spread, automated methods, tools and services for assisting users to do fact-checking (i.e., fake news detection) become necessary and helpful, for both professionals, such as journalists and researchers, and the general public such as news readers. Experts, especially researchers, play an essential role in informing people about truth and facts, which makes them a good proxy for non-experts to detect fake news by checking relevant expert opinions and comments. Therefore, in this paper, we present aedFaCT, a web browser extension that can help professionals and news readers perform fact-checking via the automatic discovery of expert opinions relevant to the news of concern via shared keywords. Our initial evaluation with three independent testers (who did not participate in the development of the extension) indicated that aedFaCT can provide a faster experience to its users compared with traditional fact-checking practices based on manual online searches, without degrading the quality of retrieved evidence for fact-checking. The source code of aedFaCT is publicly available at https://github.com/altuncu/aedFaCT.