EvidenceNet: Evidence Fusion Network for Fact Verification

ABSTRACT Fact verification is a challenging task that requires the retrieval of multiple pieces of evidence from a reliable corpus for verifying the truthfulness of a claim. Although the current methods have achieved satisfactory performance, they still suffer from one or more of the following three problems: (1) unable to extract sufficient contextual information from the evidence sentences; (2) containing redundant evidence information and (3) incapable of capturing the interaction between claim and evidence. To tackle the problems, we propose an evidence fusion network called EvidenceNet. The proposed EvidenceNet model captures global contextual information from various levels of evidence information for deep understanding. Moreover, a gating mechanism is designed to filter out redundant information in evidence. In addition, a symmetrical interaction attention mechanism is also proposed for identifying the interaction between claim and evidence. We conduct extensive experiments based on the FEVER dataset. The experimental results have shown that the proposed EvidenceNet model outperforms the current fact verification methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.