VERITAS-NLI : Validation and Extraction of Reliable Information Through Automated Scraping and Natural Language Inference

This repository contains the artifacts for our paper titled VERITAS-NLI : Validation and Extraction of Reliable Information Through Automated Scraping and Natural Language Inference, accepted and published in EAAI - Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

Our Proposed solution utilizes Real-Time Web Scraping and Natural Language Inference(NLI) Models for the task of Fake News Detection :

• Dynamic web scraping allows for real-time external knowledge retrieval for the fact-checking of headlines.
• Natural Language Inference models are used to find support for the claimed headline in the web scraped text, to ascertain the veracity of an input headline

@article{shah2025validation,
  title={Validation and Extraction of Reliable Information Through Automated Scraping and Natural Language Inference},
  author={Shah, Arjun and Shah, Hetansh and Bafna, Vedica and Khandor, Charmi and Nair, Sindhu},
  journal={Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence},
  volume={147},
  pages={110284},
  year={2025},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}

Visual Abstract

Directory Structure

├── Liar.csv  #LIAR Dataset used to train the Classical ML and BERT Models
├── Test_dataset(FINAL).csv #Our new evaluation dataset of curated and synthetic headlines
├── classical_ml_EVAL
│   ├── Classical_ml_EVAL.csv #Predictions from our Classical ML models on the evaluation dataset
│   └── *.ipynb #Notebooks used to train and test out classical baseline models
│ 
├── classical_ml_LIAR
│   └── *.ipynb
│
├── BERT_EVAL
│   ├── BERT_eval.csv #Predictions from our fine-tuned BERT model on the evaluation dataset
│   └── BERT_eval.ipynb #Notebook to compute baseline BERT predictions and results.
│ 
├── Pipeline_Article.ipynb
├── Pipeline_QNA.ipynb
├── Pipeline_SLM(Mistral).ipynb
├── Pipeline_SLM(Phi).ipynb
│ 
├── FactCC_Results #Contains the results for our pipelines utilizing FactCC as the NLI model
│   ├── Pipeline_Article.csv
│   ├── Pipeline_QNA.csv
│   ├── Pipeline_SLM(Mistral).csv
│   └── Pipeline_SLM(Phi).csv
├── Pipeline_Results_FactCC.ipynb #Computation of metrics for the pipelines utilizing FactCC
│ 
├── SummaC_Results  #Contains the results for our pipelines utilizing SummaC (ZS and Conv) as the NLI model
│   ├── Pipeline_Article.csv
│   ├── Pipeline_QNA.csv
│   ├── Pipeline_SLM(Mistral).csv
│   └── Pipeline_SLM(Phi).csv
├── Pipeline_Results_SummaC.ipynb #Computation of SummaC threshold and metrics for the pipelines utilizing SummaC(ZS and Conv)
│
├── SentenceLevelPred.ipynb #Explainability Module
│
├── Efficiency test
│   ├── Efficiency_Test.ipynb #Computes the average execution time for each step of our pipeline
│   └── *.csv #Contain the results for the execution times for each of our different pipelines and their configurations
│
├── unique_decisions.ipynb #Used to generate the venn-diagram plots of unique correct-incorrect decisions
├── scraping_selenium.py #Contains selenium function used for web-scraping in the QNA and LLM pipelines
└── requirements.txt

Illustrating the workflow of our three proposed pipelines with an input headline.

Preprint - https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09455

Explainability Module

Hyperparameters

Classical Machine Learning

Classifier Parameter Default Value Description Linear SVC penalty 'l2' Regularization type loss 'squared_hinge' Loss function dual 'auto' Dual or primal formulation tol 0.0001 Tolerance for stopping criteria max_iter 1000 Maximum iterations Logistic Regression penalty 'l2' Regularization type dual False Dual or primal formulation tol 0.0001 Tolerance for stopping criteria solver 'lbfgs' Algorithm for optimization max_iter 1000 Maximum iterations warm_start False Reuse previous solution

Classifier Parameter Default Value Description Multinomial NB alpha 1.0 Additive smoothing parameter force_alpha True Force alpha parameter for all features fit_prior True Learn class prior probabilities class_prior None Prior probabilities of classes Random Forest n_estimators 100 Number of trees criterion 'gini' Function to measure split quality min_samples_split 2 Minimum samples to split node min_samples_leaf 1 Minimum samples at leaf node max_features 'sqrt' Number of features for best split bootstrap True Bootstrap samples

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)

• num_train_epochs = 1: Given the high representational power of BERT and its pre-trained nature, a single epoch is often sufficient to fine-tune the model. Experimental results found that using a greater number of epochs leads to model overfitting.
• per_device_train_batch_size = 16 and per_device_eval_batch_size = 32: Smaller batch sizes for training help in maintaining a balance between memory usage and effective learning.
• warmup_steps = 100: Implementing a warmup phase at the beginning of training where learning rates are gradually increased helps in stabilizing the learning process, preventing the model from converging too quickly to a sub-optimal solution.
• learning_rate = 5e-5: This Learning rate is found to be most suitable for many models for the Adam Optimizer which was used in this particular model training.
• weight_decay = 0.001: This helps in regularizing the model and preventing over-fitting, which is crucial for a model as large as BERT.
• fp16 = True: This enables the model to train faster and consume less memory while maintaining the training precision, making it feasible to train larger models or use larger batch sizes.

Natural Language Inference - Summary Consistency (SummaC)

Parameter Model ZS Model Conv Granularity sentence sentence Model Name vitc vitc Device cuda cuda Bins - percentile NLI Labels - e Start File - default Aggregation - mean

Pipeline Model Best Threshold Article model_zs -0.03 model_conv 0.55 QNA model_zs -0.15 model_conv 0.21 Mistral model_zs -0.23 model_conv 0.21 Phi3 model_zs -0.13 model_conv 0.21