Learning to generate and evaluate fact-checking explanations with transformers

In an era increasingly dominated by digital platforms, the spread of misinformation poses a significant challenge, highlighting the need for solutions capable of assessing information veracity. Our research contributes to the field of Explainable Artificial Antelligence (XAI) by developing transformer-based fact-checking models that contextualise and justify their decisions by generating human-accessible explanations. Importantly, we also develop models for automatic evaluation of explanations for fact-checking verdicts across different dimensions such as (self)-contradiction, hallucination, convincingness and overall quality. By introducing human-centred evaluation methods and developing specialised datasets, we emphasise the need for aligning Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated explanations with human judgements. This approach not only advances theoretical knowledge in XAI but also holds practical implications by enhancing the transparency, reliability and users’ trust in AI-driven fact-checking systems. Furthermore, the development of our metric learning models is a first step towards potentially increasing efficiency and reducing reliance on extensive manual assessment. Based on experimental results, our best performing generative model achieved a Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation-1 (ROUGE-1) score of 47.77 demonstrating superior performance in generating fact-checking explanations, particularly when provided with high-quality evidence. Additionally, the best performing metric learning model showed a moderately strong correlation with human judgements on objective dimensions such as (self)-contradiction and hallucination, achieving a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of around 0.7.