InFact: A Strong Baseline for Automated Fact-Checking

Mark Rothermel, Tobias Braun, Marcus Rohrbach, Anna Rohrbach


Abstract
The spread of disinformation poses a global threat to democratic societies, necessitating robust and scalable Automated Fact-Checking (AFC) systems. The AVeriTeC Shared Task Challenge 2024 offers a realistic benchmark for text-based fact-checking methods. This paper presents Information-Retrieving Fact-Checker (InFact), an LLM-based approach that breaks down the task of claim verification into a 6-stage process, including evidence retrieval. When using GPT-4o as the backbone, InFact achieves an AVeriTeC score of 63% on the test set, outperforming all other 20 teams competing in the challenge, and establishing a new strong baseline for future text-only AFC systems. Qualitative analysis of mislabeled instances reveals that InFact often yields a more accurate conclusion than AVeriTeC’s human-annotated ground truth.
Anthology ID:
2024.fever-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Michael Schlichtkrull, Yulong Chen, Chenxi Whitehouse, Zhenyun Deng, Mubashara Akhtar, Rami Aly, Zhijiang Guo, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Oana Cocarascu, Arpit Mittal, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos
Venue:
FEVER
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
108–112
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.fever-1.12
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mark Rothermel, Tobias Braun, Marcus Rohrbach, and Anna Rohrbach. 2024. InFact: A Strong Baseline for Automated Fact-Checking. In Proceedings of the Seventh Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER), pages 108–112, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
InFact: A Strong Baseline for Automated Fact-Checking (Rothermel et al., FEVER 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.fever-1.12.pdf