# TruthBot: An Automated Conversational Tool for Intent Learning, Curated Information Presenting, and Fake News Alerting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.00509 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00509/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01967/) (2017)
- [Rumor Detection on Social Media with Bi-Directional Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06362/) (2020)
- [From Eliza to XiaoIce: Challenges and Opportunities with Social Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01957/) (2018)
- [Network-based Fake News Detection: A Pattern-driven Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04210/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Quality of Chatbots and Intelligent Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04579/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Intent Identification and Entity Extraction for Healthcare Queries in Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09685/) (2023)
- [Sword and Shield: Uses and Strategies of LLMs in Navigating Disinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07211/) (2025)
- [MALicious INTent Dataset and Inoculating LLMs for Enhanced Disinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14525/) (2026)
- [Global Readiness of Language Technology for Healthcare: What would it Take to Combat the Next Pandemic?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02790/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present TruthBot, an all-in-one multilingual conversational chatbot designed for seeking truth (trustworthy and verified information) on specific topics. It helps users to obtain information specific to certain topics, fact-check information, and get recent news. The chatbot learns the intent of a query by training a deep neural network from the data of the previous intents and responds appropriately when it classifies the intent in one of the classes above. Each class is implemented as a separate module that uses either its own curated knowledge-base or searches the web to obtain the correct information. The topic of the chatbot is currently set to COVID-19. However, the bot can be easily customized to any topic-specific responses. Our experimental results show that each module performs significantly better than its closest competitor, which is verified both quantitatively and through several user-based surveys in multiple languages. TruthBot has been deployed in June 2020 and is currently running.