Enhancing Structured Evidence Extraction for Fact Verification

Open-domain fact verification is the task of verifying claims in natural language texts against extracted evidence. FEVEROUS is a benchmark that requires extracting and integrating both unstructured and structured evidence to verify a given claim. Previous models suffer from low recall of structured evidence extraction, i.e., table extraction and cell selection. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method to enhance the extraction of structured evidence by leveraging the row and column semantics of tables. Our method comprises two components: (i) a coarse-grained table extraction module that selects tables based on rows and columns relevant to the claim and (ii) a fine-grained cell selection graph that combines both formats of evidence and enables multi-hop and numerical reasoning. We evaluate our method on FEVEROUS and achieve an evidence recall of 60.01% on the test set, which is 6.14% higher than the previous state-of-the-art performance. Our results demonstrate that our method can extract tables and select cells effectively, and provide better evidence sets for verdict prediction. Our code is released at https://github.com/WilliamZR/see-st