Abstract
A joint fact-verification score assesses answers and submitted evidence together. When the score improves, how much of the gain remains if the answers are held fixed? On FEVEROUS, strict score is the percentage of claims with a correct answer and a complete annotated evidence group in the submitted evidence. Across four trained DeBERTa checkpoints and 7,890 claims, replacing DCUF evidence with UnifEE evidence raises strict score by 9.61 percentage points, compared with 1.96 percentage points in answer accuracy. The paired 95% interval for the strict-score gain is [8.77, 10.43], conditional on these checkpoints. Replacing only the evidence passed to the scorer accounts for 7.92 or 9.08 percentage points when we retain the answers generated from DCUF or UnifEE evidence, respectively. To examine how this evidence gain depends on evaluation choices, we generate 470,400 responses from two 8B LLMs on FEVER, FEVEROUS, and SciFact under two answer formats and two context budgets. Increasing context from 256 to 2,048 tokens raises the fixed-answer evidence gain on FEVEROUS by 3.84 and 3.10 percentage points for Qwen and Llama, respectively. The effects fall short of the prespecified cross-dataset criterion, while some intervals extend beyond the two-point small-effect bound. Post-hoc analyses quantify changes in answers and submitted evidence, and show when aggregate accuracy and evidence-coverage rates miss the claim-level pattern. The four answer-evidence score combinations reveal changes that endpoint and aggregate metrics leave unresolved.
Explore similar work
Sep 14, 2026cs.CL
Large language models are increasingly used for automated fact checking, but end-to-end prompting often entangles evidence retrieval, reasoning, and uncertainty estimation, making failures difficult to diagnose and confidence difficult to trust. We present R2VC, a modular retrieve, reason, verify, calibrate architecture for evidence-grounded fact checking with citations and abstention. R2VC combines hybrid sparse+dense retrieval over Wikipedia, a supervised fine-tuned and DPO-aligned generator that produces diverse structured verdict candidates, an external NLI cross-encoder for evidence-based candidate selection, and a lightweight sequence-level calibrator for confidence estimation and selective abstention. On FEVER, an 8B backbone with R2VC achieves 13.74% higher accuracy than baseline. Ablation studies show that verifier-based candidate selection and confidence calibration are the largest contributors to performance. Removing candidate selection drops FEVER accuracy to 76.24%, while removing calibration nearly doubles the Brier score to 0.161. A manual analysis of 250 errors further shows that retrieval failures, especially wrong-entity evidence, remain the dominant bottleneck. Together, these results show that modular fact-checking pipelines can substantially improve both predictive accuracy and confidence reliability in open-domain verification.
Dhruv Dixit, Paritosh Pandey
Jun 23, 2026cs.CL
Fact-checking systems built on LLMs achieve high verdict accuracy on standard benchmarks, yet routinely output Supports labels whose cited evidence does not license the claim. Structured decomposition is the natural way to inspect those warrants, but rigid extraction protocols strip the full-claim context that facets need. We introduce SIFT -- claim-conditioned re-scoring of extracted evidence spans against the full claim -- paired with WSP (Warranted Supports Proportion), an automatic NLI check that the cited warrant entails the claim. We evaluate on FEVER, SciFact, 5PILS, and DP across four open-source backbones. SIFT recovers accuracy on cells where naive decomposition costs up to 27.6 points, while raising WSP above direct prompting; WSP itself calibrates against human gold evidence at AUC 0.92 and precision 0.98.
Arka Ujjal Dey, John Collomosse
Nov 5, 2025cs.CL
Large language models (LLMs) excel in generating fluent utterances but can lack reliable grounding in verified information. At the same time, knowledge-graph-based fact-checkers deliver precise and interpretable evidence, yet suffer from limited coverage or latency. By integrating LLMs with knowledge graphs and real-time search agents, we introduce a hybrid fact-checking approach that leverages the individual strengths of each component. Our system comprises three autonomous steps: 1) a Knowledge Graph (KG) Retrieval for rapid one-hop lookups in DBpedia, 2) an LM-based classification guided by a task-specific labeling prompt, producing outputs with internal rule-based logic, and 3) a Web Search Agent invoked only when KG coverage is insufficient. Our pipeline achieves an F1 score of 0.93 on the FEVER benchmark on the Supported/Refuted split without task-specific fine-tuning. To address Not enough information cases, we conduct a targeted reannotation study showing that our approach frequently uncovers valid evidence for claims originally labeled as Not Enough Information (NEI), as confirmed by both expert annotators and LLM reviewers. With this paper, we present a modular, opensource fact-checking pipeline with fallback strategies and generalization across datasets.
Shaghayegh Kolli, Richard Rosenbaum, Timo Cavelius +3