Multilingual Evidence Retrieval and Fact Verification to Combat Global Disinformation: The Power of Polyglotism

Abstract: This article investigates multilingual evidence retrieval and fact verification as a step to combat global disinformation, a first effort of this kind, to the best of our knowledge. The goal is building multilingual systems that retrieve in evidence-rich languages to verify claims in evidence-poor languages that are more commonly targeted by disinformation. To this end, our EnmBERT fact verification system shows evidence of transfer learning ability and 400 example mixed English-Romanian dataset is made available for cross-lingual transfer learning evaluation.