PledgeTracker: A System for Monitoring the Fulfilment of Pledges

Yulong Chen, Michael Sejr Schlichtkrull, Zhenyun Deng, David Corney, Nasim Asl, Joshua Salisbury, Andrew Dudfield, Andreas Vlachos

公開日: 2025/9/15

Abstract

Political pledges reflect candidates' policy commitments, but tracking their fulfilment requires reasoning over incremental evidence distributed across multiple, dynamically updated sources. Existing methods simplify this task into a document classification task, overlooking its dynamic, temporal and multi-document nature. To address this issue, we introduce \textsc{PledgeTracker}, a system that reformulates pledge verification into structured event timeline construction. PledgeTracker consists of three core components: (1) a multi-step evidence retrieval module; (2) a timeline construction module and; (3) a fulfilment filtering module, allowing the capture of the evolving nature of pledge fulfilment and producing interpretable and structured timelines. We evaluate PledgeTracker in collaboration with professional fact-checkers in real-world workflows, demonstrating its effectiveness in retrieving relevant evidence and reducing human verification effort.