What is Your Article Based On? Inferring Fine-grained Provenance

When evaluating an article and the claims it makes, a critical reader must be able to assess where the information presented comes from, and whether the various claims are mutually consistent and support the conclusion. This motivates the study of \textit{claim provenance}, which seeks to trace and explain the origins of claims. In this paper, we introduce new techniques to model and reason about the provenance of \textit{multiple} interacting claims, including how to capture \textit{fine-grained} information about the context. Our solution hinges on first identifying the sentences that potentially contain important external information. We then develop a query generator with our novel \textit{rank-aware cross attention} mechanism, which aims at generating metadata for the source article, based on the context and the signals collected from a search engine. This establishes relevant search queries, and it allows us to obtain source article candidates for each identified sentence and propose an ILP based algorithm to infer the best sources. We experiment with a newly created evaluation dataset, Politi-Prov, based on fact-checking articles from \url{www.politifact.com}; our experimental results show that our solution leads to a significant improvement over baselines.