Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims

We introduce scientific claim verification, a new task to select abstracts from the research literature containing evidence that supports or refutes a given scientific claim, and to identify rationales justifying each decision. To study this task, we construct SciFact, a dataset of 1.4K expert-written scientific claims paired with evidence-containing abstracts annotated with labels and rationales. We develop baseline models for SciFact, and demonstrate that these models benefit from combined training on a large dataset of claims about Wikipedia articles, together with the new SciFact data. We show that our claim verification system is able to identify plausible evidence for 23 / 36 claims relevant to COVID-19 on the CORD-19 corpus. Our results and experiments strongly suggest that our new task and data will support significant future research efforts.