Folasade Peace Alabi
Author directory2026
AfrIFact: Cultural Information Retrieval, Evidence Extraction And Fact Checking for African Languages
Israel Abebe Azime | Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi | Crystina Zhang | Iffat Maab | Atnafu Lambebo Tonja | Tadesse Destaw Belay | Folasade Peace Alabi | Salomey Osei | Saminu Mohammad Aliyu | Nkechinyere Faith Aguobi | Bontu Fufa Balcha | Blessing Kudzaishe Sibanda | Davis David | Mouhamadane Mboup | Daud Abolade | Neo Putini | Philipp Slusallek | David Ifeoluwa Adelani | Dietrich Klakow
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Israel Abebe Azime | Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi | Crystina Zhang | Iffat Maab | Atnafu Lambebo Tonja | Tadesse Destaw Belay | Folasade Peace Alabi | Salomey Osei | Saminu Mohammad Aliyu | Nkechinyere Faith Aguobi | Bontu Fufa Balcha | Blessing Kudzaishe Sibanda | Davis David | Mouhamadane Mboup | Daud Abolade | Neo Putini | Philipp Slusallek | David Ifeoluwa Adelani | Dietrich Klakow
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Assessing the veracity of a claim made online is a complex and important task with real-world implications. When these claims are directed at communities with limited access to information and the content concerns issues such as healthcare and culture, the consequences intensify, especially in low-resource languages. In this work, we introduce AfrIFact , a dataset that covers all necessary steps for automatic fact-checking (i.e., information retrieval, evidence extraction, and fact checking), covering ten African languages and English. Our evaluation results show that even the best embedding models lack cross-lingual retrieval capabilities, and that cultural and news documents are easier to retrieve than healthcare-domain documents, both in large corpora and in single documents. We show that LLMs lack robust multilingual fact-verification capabilities in African languages, while few-shot prompting improves performance by up to 43% in AfriqueQwen-14B, and task-specific fine-tuning further improves fact-checking accuracy by up to 26%. These findings, along with our release of the AfrIFact dataset, encourage work on low-resource information retrieval, evidence retrieval, and fact checking.