Entailed Opinion Matters: Improving the Fact-Checking Performance of Language Models by Relying on their Entailment Ability

Gaurav Kumar, Ayush Garg, Debajyoti Mazumder, Aditya Kishore, Babu Kumar, Jasabanta Patro


Abstract
Automated fact-checking has been a challenging task for the research community. Prior work has explored various strategies, such as end-to-end training, retrieval-augmented generation, and prompt engineering, to build robust fact-checking systems. However, their accuracy has not been high enough for real-world deployment. We, on the other hand, propose a new learning paradigm, where evidence classification and entailed justifications made by generative language models (GLMs) are used to train encoder-only language models (ELMs). We conducted a rigorous set of experiments, comparing our approach with recent works along with various prompting and fine-tuning strategies. Additionally, we performed ablation studies, error analysis, quality analysis of model explanations, and a domain generalisation study to provide a comprehensive understanding of our approach.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-aacl.172
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3431–3452
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.172/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gaurav Kumar, Ayush Garg, Debajyoti Mazumder, Aditya Kishore, Babu Kumar, and Jasabanta Patro. 2026. Entailed Opinion Matters: Improving the Fact-Checking Performance of Language Models by Relying on their Entailment Ability. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026, pages 3431–3452, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Entailed Opinion Matters: Improving the Fact-Checking Performance of Language Models by Relying on their Entailment Ability (Kumar et al., Findings 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.172.pdf