Multilingual Fact-Checking using LLMs

Aryan Singhal, Thomas Law, Coby Kassner, Ayushman Gupta, Evan Duan, Aviral Damle, Ryan Luo Li


Abstract
Due to the recent rise in digital misinformation, there has been great interest shown in using LLMs for fact-checking and claim verification. In this paper, we answer the question: Do LLMs know multilingual facts and can they use this knowledge for effective fact-checking? To this end, we create a benchmark by filtering multilingual claims from the X-fact dataset and evaluating the multilingual fact-checking capabilities of five LLMs across five diverse languages: Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Tamil on our benchmark. We employ three different prompting techniques: Zero-Shot, English Chain-of-Thought, and Cross-Lingual Prompting, using both greedy and self-consistency decoding. We extensively analyze our results and find that GPT-4o achieves the highest accuracy, but zero-shot prompting with self-consistency was the most effective overall. We also show that techniques like Chain-of-Thought and Cross-Lingual Prompting, which are designed to improve reasoning abilities, do not necessarily improve the fact-checking abilities of LLMs. Interestingly, we find a strong negative correlation between model accuracy and the amount of internet content for a given language. This suggests that LLMs are better at fact-checking from knowledge in low-resource languages. We hope that this study will encourage more work on multilingual fact-checking using LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2024.nlp4pi-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Daryna Dementieva, Oana Ignat, Zhijing Jin, Rada Mihalcea, Giorgio Piatti, Joel Tetreault, Steven Wilson, Jieyu Zhao
Venue:
NLP4PI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13–31
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aryan Singhal, Thomas Law, Coby Kassner, Ayushman Gupta, Evan Duan, Aviral Damle, and Ryan Luo Li. 2024. Multilingual Fact-Checking using LLMs. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact, pages 13–31, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual Fact-Checking using LLMs (Singhal et al., NLP4PI 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-1.2.pdf