From Relevance to Utility: Evidence Retrieval with Feedback for Fact Verification

Understand

Retrieval-enhanced methods have become a primary approach in fact verification (FV); it requires reasoning over multiple retrieved pieces of evidence to verify the integrity of a claim.

• To retrieve evidence, existing work often employs off-the-shelf retrieval models whose design is based on the probability ranking principle.
• We argue that, rather than relevance, for FV we need to focus on the utility that a claim verifier derives from the retrieved evidence.
• We introduce the feedback-based evidence retriever(FER) that optimizes the evidence retrieval process by incorporating feedback from the claim verifier.