Context-Aware Multimodal Claim Verification in Spoken Dialogues

Audio platforms have evolved beyond entertainment. They have become central to public discourse, from podcasts and radio to WhatsApp voice notes and live streams. With millions of shows and hundreds of millions of listeners, audio platforms are now a major channel for misinformation. Yet existing fact-checking pipelines are mostly designed for written claims, overlooking the unique properties of spoken media. We argue that audio misinformation is not merely textual content with transcripts: it is structurally different because it is both spoken - carrying persuasive force through prosody, pacing, and emotion - and conversational - unfolding across turns, speakers, and episodes. These dual properties introduce verification difficulties that traditional methods rarely face. This position paper synthesizes evidence across modalities and platforms, examines datasets and methods, and highlights why existing pipelines fail on audio. We argue that advancing fact-checking requires rethinking verification pipelines around the spoken and conversational realities of audio.

Spoken dialogue state tracking recovers slot-value pairs from speech, where ASR errors concentrate in entity values and persist across turns, making it both a generation and an editing problem. A strong per-turn text editor corrects much of this but, operating on the transcript alone, leaves three recoverable errors: a value predicted inconsistently across turns, an omitted slot, and a value the audio does not support. We present AVERT, which scores each candidate value by combining cross-turn agreement with a trained audio-conditioned verifier and resolves the three error types with three operators, vote, add, and swap, each restricted to the slots where its error is common. On SpokenWOZ, a base speech-LLM reaches 33.04 JGA, a text editor 38.34, and AVERT 40.13, without retraining either. This is in the range of a 1B end-to-end system that consumes the full spoken history (39.32), though AVERT uses two 1B decoders rather than one. The audio verifier contributes a statistically significant gain, and restricting each operator to a selected slot subset matters: removing it lets unrestricted voting overwrite correct categorical values and fall below the editor.

Misinformation verification increasingly occurs in public, fast-moving, and multilingual online settings, where static benchmarks provide an incomplete measure of model reliability. We introduce CommunityFact, a refreshable benchmark for misinformation detection in the wild, with three major goals: coverage, granularity, and redistributability. This release contains 15,992 standalone claims across five languages and two domains. We evaluate ten LLMs under varying inference-time capabilities, including thinking and web-search. Our results show that closed-input verification remains challenging, web access yields the largest gains, and web-enabled LLMs' source-selection policies are systematically misaligned with the sources human Community Notes raters converge on -- a gap that closes through model-specific mechanisms of retrieval expansion or pruning. We further find substantial variation across language-domain slices and across the evidence ecosystems used by web-enabled systems. Beyond evaluation, CommunityFact positions Community Notes as a training signal for claim-conditioned source suggesters that could improve factual verification on novel claims.