T-verifier: Verifying truthfulness of fact statements

The Web has become the most popular place for people to acquire information. Unfortunately, it is widely recognized that the Web contains a significant amount of untruthful information. As a result, good tools are needed to help Web users determine the truthfulness of certain information. In this paper, we propose a two-step method that aims to determine whether a given statement is truthful, and if it is not, find out the truthful statement most related to the given statement. In the first step, we try to find a small number of alternative statements of the same topic as the given statement and make sure that one of these statements is truthful. In the second step, we identify the truthful statement from the given statement and the alternative statements. Both steps heavily rely on analysing various features extracted from the search results returned by a popular search engine for appropriate queries. Our experimental results show the best variation of the proposed method can achieve a precision of about 90%.