Retrieving evidence to support or refute claims is a core part of automatic fact-checking. Prior work makes simplifying assumptions in retrieval that depart from real-world use cases: either no access to evidence, access to evidence curated by a human fact-checker, or access to evidence published after a claim was made. In this work, we present the first realistic pipeline to check real-world claims by retrieving raw evidence from the web. We restrict our retriever to only search documents available prior to the claim’s making, modeling the realistic scenario of emerging claims. Our pipeline includes five components: claim decomposition, raw document retrieval, fine-grained evidence retrieval, claim-focused summarization, and veracity judgment. We conduct experiments on complex political claims in the ClaimDecomp dataset and show that the aggregated evidence produced by our pipeline improves veracity judgments. Human evaluation finds the evidence summary produced by our system is reliable (it does not hallucinate information) and relevant to answering key questions about a claim, suggesting that it can assist fact-checkers even when it does not reflect a complete evidence set.

Verifying political claims is a challenging task, as politicians can use various tactics to subtly misrepresent the facts for their agenda. Existing automatic fact-checking systems fall short here, and their predictions like “half-true” are not very useful in isolation, since it is unclear which parts of a claim are true and which are not. In this work, we focus on decomposing a complex claim into a comprehensive set of yes-no subquestions whose answers influence the veracity of the claim. We present CLAIMDECOMP, a dataset of decompositions for over 1000 claims. Given a claim and its verification paragraph written by fact-checkers, our trained annotators write subquestions covering both explicit propositions of the original claim and its implicit facets, such as asking about additional political context that changes our view of the claim’s veracity. We study whether state-of-the-art models can generate such subquestions, showing that these models generate reasonable questions to ask, but predicting the comprehensive set of subquestions from the original claim without evidence remains challenging. We further show that these subquestions can help identify relevant evidence to fact-check the full claim and derive the veracity through their answers, suggesting that they can be useful pieces of a fact-checking pipeline.