On the Retrieval of Wikipedia Articles Containing Claims on Controversial Topics

Abstract

This work presents a novel claim-oriented document retrieval task. For a given controversial topic, relevant articles containing claims that support or contest the topic are retrieved from a Wikipedia corpus. For that, a two-step retrieval approach is proposed. At the first step, an initial pool of articles that are relevant to the topic are retrieved using state-of-the-art retrieval methods. At the second step, articles in the initial pool are re-ranked according to their potential to contain as many relevant claims as possible using several claim discovery features. Hence, the second step aims at maximizing the overall claim recall of the retrieval system. Using a recently published claims benchmark, the proposed retrieval approach is demonstrated to provide more relevant claims compared to several other retrieval alternatives.