  The reporting and the analysis of current events around the globe has
expanded from professional, editor-lead journalism all the way to citizen
journalism. Nowadays, politicians and other key players enjoy direct access to
their audiences through social media, bypassing the filters of official cables
or traditional media. However, the multiple advantages of free speech and
direct communication are dimmed by the misuse of media to spread inaccurate or
misleading claims. These phenomena have led to the modern incarnation of the
fact-checker -- a professional whose main aim is to examine claims using
available evidence and to assess their veracity. As in other text forensics
tasks, the amount of information available makes the work of the fact-checker
more difficult. With this in mind, starting from the perspective of the
professional fact-checker, we survey the available intelligent technologies
that can support the human expert in the different steps of her fact-checking
endeavor. These include identifying claims worth fact-checking, detecting
relevant previously fact-checked claims, retrieving relevant evidence to
fact-check a claim, and actually verifying a claim. In each case, we pay
attention to the challenges in future work and the potential impact on
real-world fact-checking.
