Multimodal Claim Extraction for Fact-Checking

Joycelyn Teo, Rui Cao, Zhenyun Deng, Zifeng Ding, Michael Sejr Schlichtkrull, Andreas Vlachos


Abstract
Automated Fact-Checking (AFC) relies on claim extraction as a first step, yet existing methods largely overlook the multimodal nature of today’s misinformation. Social media posts often combine short, informal text with images such as memes, screenshots, and photos, creating challenges that differ from both text-only claim extraction and well-studied multimodal tasks like image captioning or visual question answering. In this work, we present the first benchmark for multimodal claim extraction from social media, consisting of posts containing text and one or more images, annotated with gold-standard claims derived from real-world fact-checkers. We evaluate state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) under a three-part evaluation framework (semantic alignment, faithfulness, and decontextualization) and find that baseline MLLMs struggle to model rhetorical intent and contextual cues. To address this, we introduce MICE, an intent-aware framework which shows improvements in intent-critical cases.
Anthology ID:
2026.wassa-1.22
Volume:
The Proceedings for the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Valentin Barriere, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger, Célia Nouri, Debora Nozza, Pranaydeep Singh
Venues:
WASSA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
289–304
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wassa-1.22/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Joycelyn Teo, Rui Cao, Zhenyun Deng, Zifeng Ding, Michael Sejr Schlichtkrull, and Andreas Vlachos. 2026. Multimodal Claim Extraction for Fact-Checking. In The Proceedings for the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2026), pages 289–304, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multimodal Claim Extraction for Fact-Checking (Teo et al., WASSA 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wassa-1.22.pdf