Arabic Evidence Retrieval Eval

arabic-evidence-retrieval-eval

Overview of CheckThat! 2020: Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims in Social Media — Barrón-Cedeno et al. (2020) (arXiv:2007.07997, 2020)

What this evaluates

This benchmark tests a system's ability to retrieve relevant evidence snippets from a large pool of web pages for a given Arabic claim. It evaluates ranking performance in a retrieval setting where only a small fraction of snippets actually contain verifying evidence.

Datasets

• Arabic Evidence Retrieval Dataset — total 169902; splits: test (169902)

Metrics

• P@10 (primary) — range: [0, 1]
  • Precision at cutoff k=10, measuring the proportion of retrieved snippets that contain useful evidence among the top 10 results.

Input / output format

Input: Arabic claim text and a list of candidate web page snippets.

Output: Ranked list of evidence snippets.

Scoring recipe

def score(predictions, gold):
    top_k = predictions[:10]
    relevant_in_top_k = len(set(top_k) & gold)
    return relevant_in_top_k / 10.0

Common pitfalls

• Evaluation relies on a pooling method: only snippets returned by systems are annotated, which may bias precision estimates.
• Snippets are automatically split by punctuation, which might not align with semantic evidence boundaries.

Evidence (verbatim from paper)

In order to evaluate the submitted runs, we computed P@k at different cutoff (k = 1, 5, 10). The official measure was P@10.

Citation

@misc{barroncedeno2020checkthat,
  title={Overview of CheckThat! 2020: Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims in Social Media},
  author={Barrón-Cedeno et al. (2020)},
  year={2020},
  note={arXiv:2007.07997}
}

• arXiv: 2007.07997