# ClaimDiff: Comparing and Contrasting Claims on Contentious Issues

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12221 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12221/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14974/) (2020)
- [ERASER: A Benchmark to Evaluate Rationalized NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03429/) (2019)
- ["Liar, Liar Pants on Fire": A New Benchmark Dataset for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00648/) (2017)
- [NewsQA: A Machine Comprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09830/) (2016)
- [CLIMATE-FEVER: A Dataset for Verification of Real-World Climate Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00614/) (2020)
- [FEVEROUS: Fact Extraction and VERification Over Unstructured and Structured information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05707/) (2021)
- [WT5?! Training Text-to-Text Models to Explain their Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14546/) (2020)
- [Combining Fact Extraction and Verification with Neural Semantic Matching Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07039/) (2018)
- [COVID-Fact: Fact Extraction and Verification of Real-World Claims on COVID-19 Pandemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03794/) (2021)
- [FANG: Leveraging Social Context for Fake News Detection Using Graph Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07939/) (2020)
- [A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05638/) (2017)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 8: RumourEval: Determining rumour veracity and support for rumours](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05972/) (2017)
- [Seeing Things from a Different Angle: Discovering Diverse Perspectives about Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03538/) (2019)
- [A Richly Annotated Corpus for Different Tasks in Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01214/) (2019)
- [Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic: Modeling the Perspective of Journalists, Fact-Checkers, Social Media Platforms, Policy Makers, and the Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00033/) (2020)
- [Analysing How People Orient to and Spread Rumours in Social Media by Looking at Conversational Threads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07487/) (2015)
- [All-in-one: Multi-task Learning for Rumour Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03713/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The BiGGen Bench: A Principled Benchmark for Fine-grained Evaluation of Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05761/) (2024)
- [SegSub: Evaluating Robustness to Knowledge Conflicts and Hallucinations in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14908/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the growing importance of detecting misinformation, many studies have focused on verifying factual claims by retrieving evidence. However, canonical fact verification tasks do not apply to catching subtle differences in factually consistent claims, which might still bias the readers, especially on contentious political or economic issues. Our underlying assumption is that among the trusted sources, one's argument is not necessarily more true than the other, requiring comparison rather than verification. In this study, we propose ClaimDiff, a novel dataset that primarily focuses on comparing the nuance between claim pairs. In ClaimDiff, we provide 2,941 annotated claim pairs from 268 news articles. We observe that while humans are capable of detecting the nuances between claims, strong baselines struggle to detect them, showing over a 19% absolute gap with the humans. We hope this initial study could help readers to gain an unbiased grasp of contentious issues through machine-aided comparison.