Exploring Faithful Rationale for Multi-hop Fact Verification via Salience-Aware Graph Learning

The opaqueness of the multi-hop fact verification model imposes imperative requirements for explainability. One feasible way is to extract rationales, a subset of inputs, where the performance of prediction drops dramatically when being removed. Though being explainable, most rationale extraction methods for multi-hop fact verification explore the semantic information within each piece of evidence individually, while ignoring the topological information interaction among different pieces of evidence. Intuitively, a faithful rationale bears complementary information being able to extract other rationales through the multi-hop reasoning process. To tackle such disadvantages, we cast explainable multi-hop fact verification as subgraph extraction, which can be solved based on graph convolutional network (GCN) with salience-aware graph learning. In specific, GCN is utilized to incorporate the topological interaction information among multiple pieces of evidence for learning evidence representation. Meanwhile, to alleviate the influence of noisy evidence, the salience-aware graph perturbation is induced into the message passing of GCN. Moreover, the multi-task model with three diagnostic properties of rationale is elaborately designed to improve the quality of an explanation without any explicit annotations. Experimental results on the FEVEROUS benchmark show significant gains over previous state-of-the-art methods for both rationale extraction and fact verification.