From Articles to Premises: Building PrimeFacts, an Extraction Methodology and Resource for Fact-Checking Evidence

Premtim Sahitaj, Jawan Kolanowski, Ariana Sahitaj, Veronika Solopova, Max Upravitelev, Daniel Röder, Iffat Maab, Junichi Yamagishi, Sebastian Möller, Vera Schmitt


Abstract
Fact-checking articles encode rich supporting evidence and reasoning, yet this evidence remains largely inaccessible to automated verification systems due to unstructured presentation. We introduce PrimeFacts, a methodology and resource for extracting fine-grained evidence from full fact-checking articles. We compile 13,106 PolitiFact articles with claims, verdicts, and all referenced sources, and we identify 49,718 in-article hyperlinks as natural anchors to pinpoint key evidence. Our framework leverages large language models (LLMs) to rewrite these anchor sentences into stand-alone, context-independent premises and investigates the extraction of additional implicit evidence. In evaluations on cross-article evidence retrieval and claim verification, the extracted premises substantially improve performance. Decontextualized evidence yields higher retrievability, achieving up to a 30% relative gain in Mean Reciprocal Rank over verbatim sentences, and using the evidence for verdict prediction raises Macro-F1 by 10-20 points over the baseline. These gains are consistent across different verdict granularities (2-class vs. 5-class) and model architectures. A qualitative analysis indicates that the decontextualized premises remain faithful to the original sources. Our work highlights the promise of reusing fact-checkers’ evidence for automation and provides a large-scale resource of structured evidence from real-world fact-checks.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.613
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
7719–7731
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-613
DOI:
10.63317/453datkp6z9s
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Premtim Sahitaj, Jawan Kolanowski, Ariana Sahitaj, Veronika Solopova, Max Upravitelev, Daniel Röder, Iffat Maab, Junichi Yamagishi, Sebastian Möller, and Vera Schmitt. 2026. From Articles to Premises: Building PrimeFacts, an Extraction Methodology and Resource for Fact-Checking Evidence. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7719–7731, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
From Articles to Premises: Building PrimeFacts, an Extraction Methodology and Resource for Fact-Checking Evidence (Sahitaj et al., LREC 2026)
Copy Citation: