GitSearch: Enhancing Community Notes Generation with Gap-Informed Targeted Search
Organizations: National University of Singapore
Abstract
Community Notes enable scalable, community-based fact-checking, but automated generation faces a coverage--quality trade-off. Note-dependent methods (e.g., summarization-based Supernotes) cannot operate without prior crowd input, while web-search LLMs achieve broad coverage but often retrieve evidence misaligned with what raters need. We introduce GitSearch (Gap-Informed Targeted Search), which treats missing, ambiguous, or disputed information as first-class retrieval targets. It infers information gaps from a post and optional incomplete notes, searches specifically to resolve them, and synthesizes an evidence-grounded Community Note. To evaluate this, we introduce PolBench, a new dataset of 78,698 U.S. political tweets with Community Notes. Keeping single-call search inference budget fixed, GitSearch improves human-rated helpfulness by 0.43 over unconditioned web search and wins 59% of pairwise comparisons. It generates notes for 99% of test cases, including the 46% where summarization methods fail. Human evaluators prefer GitSearch to human-written helpful notes in 69% of comparisons, primarily due to better context coverage. These findings show that how search is organized matters more than information access alone.
Figures & tables
| LLM-as-a-Judge | ||||||
| Type | Model | FE | CA | FA | C | H |
| Llama-3.1-8B | 4.087 | 3.585 | 2.479 | 2.464 | 2.796 | |
| Ministral-8B | 4.083 | 3.589 | 2.487 | 2.355 | 2.672 | |
| Qwen3-14B | 3.974 | 3.728 | 2.615 | 2.487 | 2.838 | |
| Apriel-Nemotron-15B | 3.879 | 3.709 | 2.540 | 2.528 | 2.811 | |
| GPT-5-nano | 4.053 | 3.668 | 2.634 | 2.506 | 2.860 | |
| Method | F1 | F2 | F3 | F4 | C1 | C2 | H |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human | 0.94 | 0.91 | 0.87 | 0.81 | 0.93 | 0.69 | 3.36 |
| Supernote Lite | 0.96 | 0.83 | 0.73 | 0.77 | 0.91 | 0.53 | 3.14 |
| Web Agent | 0.96 | 0.80 | 0.89 | 0.88 | 0.85 | 0.65 | 3.44 |
| GitSearch | 0.99 | 0.89 | 0.91 | 0.90 | 0.97 | 0.87 | 3.87 |
| 0.05 | -0.02 | 0.04 | 0.09 | 0.04 | 0.18** | 0.51** |
| Method | FE | CA | FA | C | H | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Web Agent ( ) | 4.475 | 3.345 | 2.457 | 2.435 | 2.991 | |
| GitSearch ( ) | 4.238 | 3.578 | 2.565 | 2.623 | 3.049 | |
| -0.237 *** | 0.233 | 0.108 | 0.188 | 0.058 | ||
| Supernote Lite ( ) | 4.053 | 3.668 | 2.634 | 2.506 | 2.86 | |
| GitSearch ( ) | 4.291 | 3.743 | 2.732 | 2.826 | 3.219 | |
| 0.238 *** | 0.075 | 0.098 | 0.32 ** | 0.359 *** |
Appendix figures & tables14 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Method | US Politics | Others | Macro-F1 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| P | R | F1 | P | R | F | |||
| MNLI | 0.925 | 0.428 | 0.585 | 0.911 | 0.994 | 0.951 | 0.768 | |
| Keywords | 0.987 | 0.524 | 0.685 | 0.925 | 0.999 | 0.961 | 0.823 | |
| Hybrid | 0.945 | 0.710 | 0.811 | 0.953 | 0.993 | 0.973 | 0.892 | |
| Category | Statistic | Value(s) |
| Overall size | Number of tweets with notes | 78,698 |
| Number of CNs | 169,992 | |
| Time span of tweets | 2021-01-05 – 2025-09-06 | |
| Time span of CNs | 2021-01-28 – 2025-09-06 | |
| Language(s) | English | |
| Contributors | Unique contributors | 4,288 |
| Type (Generation Parameters) | Model Name | Detailed Model Name | Tool Used (If Needed) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open-source LLM | Llama-3.1-8B Grattafiori et al. (2024) | meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct | – |
| (do_sample=False) | Ministral-8B Mistral-AI (2024) | mistralai/Ministral-8B-Instruct-2410 | – |
| Open-source LRM | Apriel-Nemotron-15b Radhakrishna et al. (2025) | ServiceNow-AI/Apriel-Nemotron-15b-Thinker | – |
| (do_sample=False) | Qwen3-14B Yang et al. (2025) | Qwen/Qwen3-14B | – |
| Closed-source LRM | GPT-5-nano Singh et al. (2026) | gpt-5-nano-2025-08-07 | Web search |
| (Default) | Gemini-2.5-Flash Comanici et al. (2025) | gemini-2.5-flash | Web search |
| Similarity Scores | LLM-as-a-Judge | ||||||||||||||||
| Type | Model | BS | URL-R | FE | CA | FA | C | H | Domain Credibility | Domain Bias | # URL Used | Char Count | Coverage (# of Notes) | ||||
| Human-written Note | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | 0.96 | -0.377 | 1.668 | 172 | 488 | ||||
| Llama-3.1-8B | 0.193 | 0.864 | 0.12 | 4.087 | 3.585 | 2.479 | 2.464 | 2.796 | 0.935 | -0.55 | 1.808 | 225 | 265 | ||||
| Ministral-8B | 0.208 | 0.861 | 0.125 | 4.083 | 3.589 | 2.487 | 2.355 | 2.672 | 0.954 | -0.445 | 1.8 | 154 | 265 | ||||
| Qwen3-14B | 0.202 | 0.868 | 0.122 | 3.974 | 3.728 | 2.615 | 2.487 | 2.838 | 0.956 | -0.396 | 1.525 | 147 | 265 | ||||
| Apriel-Nemotron-15B | 0.192 | 0.862 | 0.107 | 3.879 | 3.709 | 2.540 | 2.528 | 2.811 | 0.954 | -0.329 | 1.664 | 227 | 265 | ||||
| Term | Coef. | SE | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intercept | 3.410 | 0.139 | 0.001 |
| GitSearch | 0.520 | 0.190 | 0.007 |
| SN Lite | 0.228 | 0.190 | 0.232 |
| Web Agent | 0.109 | 0.192 | 0.569 |
| Length (chars) | 0.0003 | 0.000 | 0.172 |
| Term | Coef. | SE | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intercept | 0.260 | 0.117 | 0.026 |
| GitSearch | 1.093 | 0.171 | 0.001 |
| SN Lite | 0.399 | 0.168 | 0.018 |
| Web Agent | 0.354 | 0.165 | 0.032 |
| Length difference | 0.0001 | 0.000 | 0.296 |
| Fact-checked Tweet | Rank | Method | H | Note Content (Excerpt) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| “Absolutely insane that Democrats actually voted to have the US government publish chld prn. WTF is even going on anymore???” | 1 | GitSearch (Gemini-2.5-Flash) | 5 | Claims that Democrats voted to publish chld prngrphy are false. The Epstein Files Transparency Act explicitly prohibits releasing chld sx**l abuse material and victims’ personal information. |
| 2 | Human-written CN | 4 | The Ro Khanna amendment does not compel the government to publish chld prngrphy; the sponsor clarified that the DOJ would protect victims’ identities. | |
| 3 | Supernotes-Lite (Gemini-2.5-Flash) | 3 | Publishing chld prngrphy is illegal under U.S. law; proposed amendments aim to ensure compliance with existing prohibitions. | |
| 4 | Web-Search Agent (Gemini-2.5-Flash) | 2 | U.S. law criminalizes the production and distribution of chld prngrphy, but does not address the specific legislative claim. | |
| “FIRED.” | 1 | GitSearch (Gemini-2.5-Flash) | 4 | Jerome Powell was not fired on July 16, 2025; President Trump stated that firing him was “highly unlikely,” resolving the ambiguity of the original post. |
| 2 | Supernotes-Lite (Gemini-2.5-Flash) | 3 | Jerome Powell has not been fired; the post reflects a preference rather than a factual claim. |
Automated Fact-Checking
Automated fact-checking detects checkable claims, retrieves evidence, and assesses whether that evidence supports or refutes them.
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