Overview of the CLEF–2023 CheckThat! Lab on Checkworthiness, Subjectivity, Political Bias, Factuality, and Authority of News Articles and Their Source

Proceedings of the 14th International Conference of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum for European Languages, CLEF 2023 -- 18 September 2023 through 21 September 2023 -- 300519
We describe the sixth edition of the CheckThat! lab, part of the 2023 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The five previous editions of CheckThat! focused on the main tasks of the information verification pipeline: check-worthiness, verifying whether a claim was fact-checked before, supporting evidence retrieval, and claim verification. In this sixth edition, we zoom into some new problems and for the first time we offer five tasks in seven languages: Arabic, Dutch, English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish. Task 1 asks to determine whether an item —text or text plus image— is check-worthy. Task 2 aims to predict whether a sentence from a news article is subjective or not. Task 3 asks to assess the political bias of the news at the article and at the media outlet level. Task 4 focuses on the factuality of reporting of news media. Finally, Task 5 looks at identifying authorities in Twitter that could help verify a given target claim. For a second year, CheckThat! was the most popular lab at CLEF-2023 in terms of team registrations: 127 teams. About one-third of them (a total of 37) actually participated. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
11S-1204-170060, 6-1-0611-19074, PE00000013, PNRRM4C2-Investimento 1.3; Qatar Foundation, QF; Qatar National Research Fund, QNRF
The work of F. Alam, M. Hasanain and W. Zaghouani is partially supported by NPRP 13S-0206-200281 and NPRP 14C-0916-210015 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The work of A. Galassi is supported by the European Commission NextGeneration EU programme, PNRRM4C2-Investimento 1.3, PE00000013-“FAIR” Spoke 8. The work of Fatima Haouari was supported by GSRA grant #GSRA6-1-0611-19074 from the Qatar National Research Fund. The work of Tamer Elsayed was made possible by NPRP grant #NPRP-11S-1204-170060 from the Qatar National Research Fund. The findings achieved herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.