Kernel Graph Attention Network for Fact Verification

This paper presents Kernel Graph Attention Network (KGAT), which conducts more fine-grained evidence selection and reasoning for the fact verification task. Given a claim and a set of potential supporting evidence sentences, KGAT constructs a graph attention network using the evidence sentences as its nodes and learns to verify the claim integrity using its edge kernels and node kernels, where the edge kernels learn to propagate information across the evidence graph, and the node kernels learn to merge node level information to the graph level. KGAT reaches a comparable performance (69.4%) on FEVER, a large-scale benchmark for fact verification. Our experiments find that KGAT thrives on verification scenarios where multiple evidence pieces are required. This advantage mainly comes from the sparse and fine-grained attention mechanisms from our kernel technique.