FactCorp: A Corpus of Dutch Fact-checks and its Multiple Usages

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 1286–1292 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 1286 FactCorp: A Corpus of Dutch Fact-checks and its Multiple Usages Marten van der Meulen, W. Gudrun Reijnierse Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University PO Box 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands m.vandermeulen@let.ru.nl, g.reijnierse@let.ru.nl Abstract Fact-checking information before publication has long been a core task for journalists, but recent times have seen the emergence of dedicated news items specifically aimed at fact-checking after publication. This relatively new form of fact-checking receives a fair amount of attention from academics, with current research focusing mostly on journalists’ motivations for publishing post-hoc fact- checks, the effects of fact-checking on the perceived accuracy of false claims, and the creation of computational tools for automatic fact- checking. In this paper, we propose to study fact-checks from a corpus linguistic perspective. This will enable us to gain insight in the scope and contents of fact-checks, to investigate what fact-checks can teach us about the way in which science appears (incorrectly) in the news, and to see how fact-checks behave in the science communication landscape. We report on the creation of FactCorp, a 1,16 million-word corpus containing 1,974 fact-checks from three major Dutch newspapers. We also present results of several exploratory analyses, including a rhetorical moves analysis, a qualitative content elements analysis, and keyword analyses. Through these analyses, we aim to demonstrate the wealth of possible applications that FactCorp allows, thereby stressing the importance of creating such resources. Keywords: fact-checks, corpus linguistics, science communication, genre analysis 1. Introduction While the checking of facts has always been an integral part of the publication cycle of journalism (so-called ‘internal’ or ‘ante hoc’ fact-checking), fact-checks as separate news items (so-called ‘external’ or ‘post hoc’ fact-checking) seem to only to have been undertaken since the 2000s (Graves and Cherubini, 2016:6). Since then, however, post hoc fact-checks have quickly become a staple of news reporting. Nowadays, over 200 dedicated fact-checking websites are active worldwide (Stencel and Luther, 2019), and an even larger number of newspapers contain fact- checking articles on a regular or incidental basis (Graves, Nyhan and Reifler, 2015). Although fact-checking seems to gain traction around elections in particular, political claims are not the only source for fact-checking. There are also initiatives that focus on a broader range of (online) misinformation, or on more specific topics such as health- and science-related claims (Stencel, 2019). The rise in fact-checks has been accompanied by a fair amount of academic interest in the phenomenon. To date, fact-checking research has primarily focused on three strands of research: the effects of fact-checks on readers, fact-checkers’ motivations and practices, and the development of tools for automatic fact-checking. The first strand of research has investigated the effect of fact-checks on aspects such as the perceived accuracy of false claims (e.g., Garret, Nesbit and Lynch, 2013), and attitudes towards politicians (e.g., Nyhan et al., 2019; Wintersieck, 2017). Other empirical studies examined how …

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