CheckIT!: A Corpus of Expert Fact-Checked Claims for Italian

Abstract

This paper introduces CheckIT!, a resource of expert fact-checked claims, filling a gap for the development of fact-checking pipelines in Italian. We further investigate the use of three state-of-the-art generative text models to create variations of claims in zero-shot settings as a data-augmentation strategy for the identification of previously fact-checked claims. Our results indicate that models struggles in varying the surface forms of the claims.