Daily Papers

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for complex research tasks such as literature review, idea generation, and scientific paper analysis, yet their ability to truly understand and process the intricate relationships within complex research papers, such as the logical links between claims and supporting evidence remains largely unexplored. In this study, we present CLAIM-BENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capabilities in scientific claim-evidence extraction and validation, a task that reflects deeper comprehension of scientific argumentation. We systematically compare three approaches which are inspired by divide and conquer approaches, across six diverse LLMs, highlighting model-specific strengths and weaknesses in scientific comprehension. Through evaluation involving over 300 claim-evidence pairs across multiple research domains, we reveal significant limitations in LLMs' ability to process complex scientific content. Our results demonstrate that closed-source models like GPT-4 and Claude consistently outperform open-source counterparts in precision and recall across claim-evidence identification tasks. Furthermore, strategically designed three-pass and one-by-one prompting approaches significantly improve LLMs' abilities to accurately link dispersed evidence with claims, although this comes at increased computational cost. CLAIM-BENCH sets a new standard for evaluating scientific comprehension in LLMs, offering both a diagnostic tool and a path forward for building systems capable of deeper, more reliable reasoning across full-length papers.

Scientific research relies on accurate citation for attribution and integrity, yet large language models (LLMs) introduce a new risk: fabricated references that appear plausible but correspond to no real publications. Such hallucinated citations have already been observed in submissions and accepted papers at major machine learning venues, exposing vulnerabilities in peer review. Meanwhile, rapidly growing reference lists make manual verification impractical, and existing automated tools remain fragile to noisy and heterogeneous citation formats and lack standardized evaluation. We present the first comprehensive benchmark and detection framework for hallucinated citations in scientific writing. Our multi-agent verification pipeline decomposes citation checking into claim extraction, evidence retrieval, passage matching, reasoning, and calibrated judgment to assess whether a cited source truly supports its claim. We construct a large-scale human-validated dataset across domains and define unified metrics for citation faithfulness and evidence alignment. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs reveal substantial citation errors and show that our framework significantly outperforms prior methods in both accuracy and interpretability. This work provides the first scalable infrastructure for auditing citations in the LLM era and practical tools to improve the trustworthiness of scientific references.

We introduce scientific claim verification, a new task to select abstracts from the research literature containing evidence that SUPPORTS or REFUTES a given scientific claim, and to identify rationales justifying each decision. To study this task, we construct SciFact, a dataset of 1.4K expert-written scientific claims paired with evidence-containing abstracts annotated with labels and rationales. We develop baseline models for SciFact, and demonstrate that simple domain adaptation techniques substantially improve performance compared to models trained on Wikipedia or political news. We show that our system is able to verify claims related to COVID-19 by identifying evidence from the CORD-19 corpus. Our experiments indicate that SciFact will provide a challenging testbed for the development of new systems designed to retrieve and reason over corpora containing specialized domain knowledge. Data and code for this new task are publicly available at https://github.com/allenai/scifact. A leaderboard and COVID-19 fact-checking demo are available at https://scifact.apps.allenai.org.

Verifying scientific claims presents a significantly greater challenge than verifying political or news-related claims. Unlike the relatively broad audience for political claims, the users of scientific claim verification systems can vary widely, ranging from researchers testing specific hypotheses to everyday users seeking information on a medication. Additionally, the evidence for scientific claims is often highly complex, involving technical terminology and intricate domain-specific concepts that require specialized models for accurate verification. Despite considerable interest from the research community, there is a noticeable lack of large-scale scientific claim verification datasets to benchmark and train effective models. To bridge this gap, we introduce two large-scale datasets, SciClaimHunt and SciClaimHunt_Num, derived from scientific research papers. We propose several baseline models tailored for scientific claim verification to assess the effectiveness of these datasets. Additionally, we evaluate models trained on SciClaimHunt and SciClaimHunt_Num against existing scientific claim verification datasets to gauge their quality and reliability. Furthermore, we conduct human evaluations of the claims in proposed datasets and perform error analysis to assess the effectiveness of the proposed baseline models. Our findings indicate that SciClaimHunt and SciClaimHunt_Num serve as highly reliable resources for training models in scientific claim verification.

Claim verification can be a challenging task. In this paper, we present a method to enhance the robustness and reasoning capabilities of automated claim verification through the extraction of short facts from evidence. Our novel approach, FactDetect, leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate concise factual statements from evidence and label these facts based on their semantic relevance to the claim and evidence. The generated facts are then combined with the claim and evidence. To train a lightweight supervised model, we incorporate a fact-detection task into the claim verification process as a multitasking approach to improve both performance and explainability. We also show that augmenting FactDetect in the claim verification prompt enhances performance in zero-shot claim verification using LLMs. Our method demonstrates competitive results in the supervised claim verification model by 15% on the F1 score when evaluated for challenging scientific claim verification datasets. We also demonstrate that FactDetect can be augmented with claim and evidence for zero-shot prompting (AugFactDetect) in LLMs for verdict prediction. We show that AugFactDetect outperforms the baseline with statistical significance on three challenging scientific claim verification datasets with an average of 17.3% performance gain compared to the best performing baselines.

We present SciClaimEval, a new scientific dataset for the claim verification task. Unlike existing resources, SciClaimEval features authentic claims, including refuted ones, directly extracted from published papers. To create refuted claims, we introduce a novel approach that modifies the supporting evidence (figures and tables), rather than altering the claims or relying on large language models (LLMs) to fabricate contradictions. The dataset provides cross-modal evidence with diverse representations: figures are available as images, while tables are provided in multiple formats, including images, LaTeX source, HTML, and JSON. SciClaimEval contains 1,664 annotated samples from 180 papers across three domains, machine learning, natural language processing, and medicine, validated through expert annotation. We benchmark 11 multimodal foundation models, both open-source and proprietary, across the dataset. Results show that figure-based verification remains particularly challenging for all models, as a substantial performance gap remains between the best system and human baseline.

The rapid propagation of misinformation poses substantial risks to public interest. To combat misinformation, large language models (LLMs) are adapted to automatically verify claim credibility. Nevertheless, existing methods heavily rely on the embedded knowledge within LLMs and / or black-box APIs for evidence collection, leading to subpar performance with smaller LLMs or upon unreliable context. In this paper, we propose retrieval augmented fact verification through the synthesis of contrasting arguments (RAFTS). Upon input claims, RAFTS starts with evidence retrieval, where we design a retrieval pipeline to collect and re-rank relevant documents from verifiable sources. Then, RAFTS forms contrastive arguments (i.e., supporting or refuting) conditioned on the retrieved evidence. In addition, RAFTS leverages an embedding model to identify informative demonstrations, followed by in-context prompting to generate the prediction and explanation. Our method effectively retrieves relevant documents as evidence and evaluates arguments from varying perspectives, incorporating nuanced information for fine-grained decision-making. Combined with informative in-context examples as prior, RAFTS achieves significant improvements to supervised and LLM baselines without complex prompts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments, where RAFTS can outperform GPT-based methods with a significantly smaller 7B LLM.

Assessing scientific claims requires identifying, extracting, and reasoning with multimodal data expressed in information-rich figures in scientific literature. Despite the large body of work in scientific QA, figure captioning, and other multimodal reasoning tasks over chart-based data, there are no readily usable multimodal benchmarks that directly test claim verification abilities. To remedy this gap, we introduce a new benchmark MuSciClaims accompanied by diagnostics tasks. We automatically extract supported claims from scientific articles, which we manually perturb to produce contradicted claims. The perturbations are designed to test for a specific set of claim verification capabilities. We also introduce a suite of diagnostic tasks that help understand model failures. Our results show most vision-language models are poor (~0.3-0.5 F1), with even the best model only achieving 0.72 F1. They are also biased towards judging claims as supported, likely misunderstanding nuanced perturbations within the claims. Our diagnostics show models are bad at localizing correct evidence within figures, struggle with aggregating information across modalities, and often fail to understand basic components of the figure.

Traditionally, a debate usually requires a manual preparation process, including reading plenty of articles, selecting the claims, identifying the stances of the claims, seeking the evidence for the claims, etc. As the AI debate attracts more attention these years, it is worth exploring the methods to automate the tedious process involved in the debating system. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive and large dataset named IAM, which can be applied to a series of argument mining tasks, including claim extraction, stance classification, evidence extraction, etc. Our dataset is collected from over 1k articles related to 123 topics. Near 70k sentences in the dataset are fully annotated based on their argument properties (e.g., claims, stances, evidence, etc.). We further propose two new integrated argument mining tasks associated with the debate preparation process: (1) claim extraction with stance classification (CESC) and (2) claim-evidence pair extraction (CEPE). We adopt a pipeline approach and an end-to-end method for each integrated task separately. Promising experimental results are reported to show the values and challenges of our proposed tasks, and motivate future research on argument mining.

A common strategy for fact-checking long-form content generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) is extracting simple claims that can be verified independently. Since inaccurate or incomplete claims compromise fact-checking results, ensuring claim quality is critical. However, the lack of a standardized evaluation framework impedes assessment and comparison of claim extraction methods. To address this gap, we propose a framework for evaluating claim extraction in the context of fact-checking along with automated, scalable, and replicable methods for applying this framework, including novel approaches for measuring coverage and decontextualization. We also introduce Claimify, an LLM-based claim extraction method, and demonstrate that it outperforms existing methods under our evaluation framework. A key feature of Claimify is its ability to handle ambiguity and extract claims only when there is high confidence in the correct interpretation of the source text.

In this paper, we explore the problem of Claim Extraction using one-to-many text generation methods, comparing LLMs, small summarization models finetuned for the task, and a previous NER-centric baseline QACG. As the current publications on Claim Extraction, Fact Extraction, Claim Generation and Check-worthy Claim Detection are quite scattered in their means and terminology, we compile their common objectives, releasing the FEVERFact dataset, with 17K atomic factual claims extracted from 4K contextualised Wikipedia sentences, adapted from the original FEVER. We compile the known objectives into an Evaluation framework of: Atomicity, Fluency, Decontextualization, Faithfulness checked for each generated claim separately, and Focus and Coverage measured against the full set of predicted claims for a single input. For each metric, we implement a scale using a reduction to an already-explored NLP task. We validate our metrics against human grading of generic claims, to see that the model ranking on F_{fact}, our hardest metric, did not change and the evaluation framework approximates human grading very closely in terms of F_1 and RMSE.

Claim verification is critical for enhancing digital literacy. However, the state-of-the-art single-LLM methods struggle with complex claim verification that involves multi-faceted evidences. Inspired by real-world fact-checking practices, we propose DebateCV, the first claim verification framework that adopts a debate-driven methodology using multiple LLM agents. In our framework, two Debaters take opposing stances on a claim and engage in multi-round argumentation, while a Moderator evaluates the arguments and renders a verdict with justifications. To further improve the performance of the Moderator, we introduce a novel post-training strategy that leverages synthetic debate data generated by the zero-shot DebateCV, effectively addressing the scarcity of real-world debate-driven claim verification data. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing claim verification methods under varying levels of evidence quality. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DebateCV-6781.

Given the widespread dissemination of misinformation on social media, implementing fact-checking mechanisms for online claims is essential. Manually verifying every claim is highly challenging, underscoring the need for an automated fact-checking system. This paper presents our system designed to address this issue. We utilize the Averitec dataset to assess the veracity of claims. In addition to veracity prediction, our system provides supporting evidence, which is extracted from the dataset. We develop a Retrieve and Generate (RAG) pipeline to extract relevant evidence sentences from a knowledge base, which are then inputted along with the claim into a large language model (LLM) for classification. We also evaluate the few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities of multiple LLMs. Our system achieves an 'Averitec' score of 0.33, which is a 22% absolute improvement over the baseline. All code will be made available on All code will be made available on https://github.com/ronit-singhal/evidence-backed-fact-checking-using-rag-and-few-shot-in-context-learning-with-llms.

Fact verification has attracted a lot of attention in the machine learning and natural language processing communities, as it is one of the key methods for detecting misinformation. Existing large-scale benchmarks for this task have focused mostly on textual sources, i.e. unstructured information, and thus ignored the wealth of information available in structured formats, such as tables. In this paper we introduce a novel dataset and benchmark, Fact Extraction and VERification Over Unstructured and Structured information (FEVEROUS), which consists of 87,026 verified claims. Each claim is annotated with evidence in the form of sentences and/or cells from tables in Wikipedia, as well as a label indicating whether this evidence supports, refutes, or does not provide enough information to reach a verdict. Furthermore, we detail our efforts to track and minimize the biases present in the dataset and could be exploited by models, e.g. being able to predict the label without using evidence. Finally, we develop a baseline for verifying claims against text and tables which predicts both the correct evidence and verdict for 18% of the claims.

In this paper we introduce a new publicly available dataset for verification against textual sources, FEVER: Fact Extraction and VERification. It consists of 185,445 claims generated by altering sentences extracted from Wikipedia and subsequently verified without knowledge of the sentence they were derived from. The claims are classified as Supported, Refuted or NotEnoughInfo by annotators achieving 0.6841 in Fleiss kappa. For the first two classes, the annotators also recorded the sentence(s) forming the necessary evidence for their judgment. To characterize the challenge of the dataset presented, we develop a pipeline approach and compare it to suitably designed oracles. The best accuracy we achieve on labeling a claim accompanied by the correct evidence is 31.87%, while if we ignore the evidence we achieve 50.91%. Thus we believe that FEVER is a challenging testbed that will help stimulate progress on claim verification against textual sources.

We contribute the largest publicly available dataset of naturally occurring factual claims for the purpose of automatic claim verification. It is collected from 26 fact checking websites in English, paired with textual sources and rich metadata, and labelled for veracity by human expert journalists. We present an in-depth analysis of the dataset, highlighting characteristics and challenges. Further, we present results for automatic veracity prediction, both with established baselines and with a novel method for joint ranking of evidence pages and predicting veracity that outperforms all baselines. Significant performance increases are achieved by encoding evidence, and by modelling metadata. Our best-performing model achieves a Macro F1 of 49.2%, showing that this is a challenging testbed for claim veracity prediction.

Textual claims are often accompanied by images to enhance their credibility and spread on social media, but this also raises concerns about the spread of misinformation. Existing datasets for automated verification of image-text claims remain limited, as they often consist of synthetic claims and lack evidence annotations to capture the reasoning behind the verdict. In this work, we introduce AVerImaTeC, a dataset consisting of 1,297 real-world image-text claims. Each claim is annotated with question-answer (QA) pairs containing evidence from the web, reflecting a decomposed reasoning regarding the verdict. We mitigate common challenges in fact-checking datasets such as contextual dependence, temporal leakage, and evidence insufficiency, via claim normalization, temporally constrained evidence annotation, and a two-stage sufficiency check. We assess the consistency of the annotation in AVerImaTeC via inter-annotator studies, achieving a kappa=0.742 on verdicts and 74.7% consistency on QA pairs. We also propose a novel evaluation method for evidence retrieval and conduct extensive experiments to establish baselines for verifying image-text claims using open-web evidence.

Claims made by individuals or entities are oftentimes nuanced and cannot be clearly labeled as entirely "true" or "false" -- as is frequently the case with scientific and political claims. However, a claim (e.g., "vaccine A is better than vaccine B") can be dissected into its integral aspects and sub-aspects (e.g., efficacy, safety, distribution), which are individually easier to validate. This enables a more comprehensive, structured response that provides a well-rounded perspective on a given problem while also allowing the reader to prioritize specific angles of interest within the claim (e.g., safety towards children). Thus, we propose ClaimSpect, a retrieval-augmented generation-based framework for automatically constructing a hierarchy of aspects typically considered when addressing a claim and enriching them with corpus-specific perspectives. This structure hierarchically partitions an input corpus to retrieve relevant segments, which assist in discovering new sub-aspects. Moreover, these segments enable the discovery of varying perspectives towards an aspect of the claim (e.g., support, neutral, or oppose) and their respective prevalence (e.g., "how many biomedical papers believe vaccine A is more transportable than B?"). We apply ClaimSpect to a wide variety of real-world scientific and political claims featured in our constructed dataset, showcasing its robustness and accuracy in deconstructing a nuanced claim and representing perspectives within a corpus. Through real-world case studies and human evaluation, we validate its effectiveness over multiple baselines.

Argument mining involves multiple sub-tasks that automatically identify argumentative elements, such as claim detection, evidence extraction, stance classification, etc. However, each subtask alone is insufficient for a thorough understanding of the argumentative structure and reasoning process. To learn a complete view of an argument essay and capture the interdependence among argumentative components, we need to know what opinions people hold (i.e., claims), why those opinions are valid (i.e., supporting evidence), which source the evidence comes from (i.e., evidence type), and how those claims react to the debating topic (i.e., stance). In this work, we for the first time propose a challenging argument quadruplet extraction task (AQE), which can provide an all-in-one extraction of four argumentative components, i.e., claims, evidence, evidence types, and stances. To support this task, we construct a large-scale and challenging dataset. However, there is no existing method that can solve the argument quadruplet extraction. To fill this gap, we propose a novel quad-tagging augmented generative approach, which leverages a quadruplet tagging module to augment the training of the generative framework. The experimental results on our dataset demonstrate the empirical superiority of our proposed approach over several strong baselines.

Automatic fact-checking has recently received more attention as a means of combating misinformation. Despite significant advancements, fact-checking systems based on retrieval-augmented language models still struggle to tackle adversarial claims, which are intentionally designed by humans to challenge fact-checking systems. To address these challenges, we propose a training-free method designed to rephrase the original claim, making it easier to locate supporting evidence. Our modular framework, SUCEA, decomposes the task into three steps: 1) Claim Segmentation and Decontextualization that segments adversarial claims into independent sub-claims; 2) Iterative Evidence Retrieval and Claim Editing that iteratively retrieves evidence and edits the subclaim based on the retrieved evidence; 3) Evidence Aggregation and Label Prediction that aggregates all retrieved evidence and predicts the entailment label. Experiments on two challenging fact-checking datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly improves on both retrieval and entailment label accuracy, outperforming four strong claim-decomposition-based baselines.

This article presents a pipeline for automated fact-checking leveraging publicly available Language Models and data. The objective is to assess the accuracy of textual claims using evidence from a ground-truth evidence corpus. The pipeline consists of two main modules -- the evidence retrieval and the claim veracity evaluation. Our primary focus is on the ease of deployment in various languages that remain unexplored in the field of automated fact-checking. Unlike most similar pipelines, which work with evidence sentences, our pipeline processes data on a paragraph level, simplifying the overall architecture and data requirements. Given the high cost of annotating language-specific fact-checking training data, our solution builds on the Question Answering for Claim Generation (QACG) method, which we adapt and use to generate the data for all models of the pipeline. Our strategy enables the introduction of new languages through machine translation of only two fixed datasets of moderate size. Subsequently, any number of training samples can be generated based on an evidence corpus in the target language. We provide open access to all data and fine-tuned models for Czech, English, Polish, and Slovak pipelines, as well as to our codebase that may be used to reproduce the results.We comprehensively evaluate the pipelines for all four languages, including human annotations and per-sample difficulty assessment using Pointwise V-information. The presented experiments are based on full Wikipedia snapshots to promote reproducibility. To facilitate implementation and user interaction, we develop the FactSearch application featuring the proposed pipeline and the preliminary feedback on its performance.

Verifying complex political claims is a challenging task, especially when politicians use various tactics to subtly misrepresent the facts. Automatic fact-checking systems fall short here, and their predictions like "half-true" are not very useful in isolation, since we have no idea which parts of the 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.

The scientific claim verification task requires an NLP system to label scientific documents which Support or Refute an input claim, and to select evidentiary sentences (or rationales) justifying each predicted label. In this work, we present MultiVerS, which predicts a fact-checking label and identifies rationales in a multitask fashion based on a shared encoding of the claim and full document context. This approach accomplishes two key modeling goals. First, it ensures that all relevant contextual information is incorporated into each labeling decision. Second, it enables the model to learn from instances annotated with a document-level fact-checking label, but lacking sentence-level rationales. This allows MultiVerS to perform weakly-supervised domain adaptation by training on scientific documents labeled using high-precision heuristics. Our approach outperforms two competitive baselines on three scientific claim verification datasets, with particularly strong performance in zero / few-shot domain adaptation experiments. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/dwadden/multivers.

In the context of fact-checking, claims are often repeated across various platforms and in different languages, which can benefit from a process that reduces this redundancy. While retrieving previously fact-checked claims has been investigated as a solution, the growing number of unverified claims and expanding size of fact-checked databases calls for alternative, more efficient solutions. A promising solution is to group claims that discuss the same underlying facts into clusters to improve claim retrieval and validation. However, research on claim clustering is hindered by the lack of suitable datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce MultiClaimNet, a collection of three multilingual claim cluster datasets containing claims in 86 languages across diverse topics. Claim clusters are formed automatically from claim-matching pairs with limited manual intervention. We leverage two existing claim-matching datasets to form the smaller datasets within MultiClaimNet. To build the larger dataset, we propose and validate an approach involving retrieval of approximate nearest neighbors to form candidate claim pairs and an automated annotation of claim similarity using large language models. This larger dataset contains 85.3K fact-checked claims written in 78 languages. We further conduct extensive experiments using various clustering techniques and sentence embedding models to establish baseline performance. Our datasets and findings provide a strong foundation for scalable claim clustering, contributing to efficient fact-checking pipelines.

Given a natural language statement, how to verify its veracity against a large-scale textual knowledge source like Wikipedia? Most existing neural models make predictions without giving clues about which part of a false claim goes wrong. In this paper, we propose LOREN, an approach for interpretable fact verification. We decompose the verification of the whole claim at phrase-level, where the veracity of the phrases serves as explanations and can be aggregated into the final verdict according to logical rules. The key insight of LOREN is to represent claim phrase veracity as three-valued latent variables, which are regularized by aggregation logical rules. The final claim verification is based on all latent variables. Thus, LOREN enjoys the additional benefit of interpretability -- it is easy to explain how it reaches certain results with claim phrase veracity. Experiments on a public fact verification benchmark show that LOREN is competitive against previous approaches while enjoying the merit of faithful and accurate interpretability. The resources of LOREN are available at: https://github.com/jiangjiechen/LOREN.

The increasing concern with misinformation has stimulated research efforts on automatic fact checking. The recently-released FEVER dataset introduced a benchmark fact-verification task in which a system is asked to verify a claim using evidential sentences from Wikipedia documents. In this paper, we present a connected system consisting of three homogeneous neural semantic matching models that conduct document retrieval, sentence selection, and claim verification jointly for fact extraction and verification. For evidence retrieval (document retrieval and sentence selection), unlike traditional vector space IR models in which queries and sources are matched in some pre-designed term vector space, we develop neural models to perform deep semantic matching from raw textual input, assuming no intermediate term representation and no access to structured external knowledge bases. We also show that Pageview frequency can also help improve the performance of evidence retrieval results, that later can be matched by using our neural semantic matching network. For claim verification, unlike previous approaches that simply feed upstream retrieved evidence and the claim to a natural language inference (NLI) model, we further enhance the NLI model by providing it with internal semantic relatedness scores (hence integrating it with the evidence retrieval modules) and ontological WordNet features. Experiments on the FEVER dataset indicate that (1) our neural semantic matching method outperforms popular TF-IDF and encoder models, by significant margins on all evidence retrieval metrics, (2) the additional relatedness score and WordNet features improve the NLI model via better semantic awareness, and (3) by formalizing all three subtasks as a similar semantic matching problem and improving on all three stages, the complete model is able to achieve the state-of-the-art results on the FEVER test set.

Existing datasets for automated fact-checking have substantial limitations, such as relying on artificial claims, lacking annotations for evidence and intermediate reasoning, or including evidence published after the claim. In this paper we introduce AVeriTeC, a new dataset of 4,568 real-world claims covering fact-checks by 50 different organizations. Each claim is annotated with question-answer pairs supported by evidence available online, as well as textual justifications explaining how the evidence combines to produce a verdict. Through a multi-round annotation process, we avoid common pitfalls including context dependence, evidence insufficiency, and temporal leakage, and reach a substantial inter-annotator agreement of kappa=0.619 on verdicts. We develop a baseline as well as an evaluation scheme for verifying claims through several question-answering steps against the open web.

Seeking health-related advice on the internet has become a common practice in the digital era. Determining the trustworthiness of medical claims found online and finding appropriate evidence for this information is increasingly challenging. Fact-checking has emerged as an approach to assess the veracity of factual claims using evidence from credible knowledge sources. To help advance the automation of this task, in this paper, we introduce a novel dataset of 750 health-related claims, labeled for veracity by medical experts and backed with evidence from appropriate clinical studies. We provide an analysis of the dataset, highlighting its characteristics and challenges. The dataset can be used for Machine Learning tasks related to automated fact-checking such as evidence retrieval, veracity prediction, and explanation generation. For this purpose, we provide baseline models based on different approaches, examine their performance, and discuss the findings.

Typical fact verification models use retrieved written evidence to verify claims. Evidence sources, however, often change over time as more information is gathered and revised. In order to adapt, models must be sensitive to subtle differences in supporting evidence. We present VitaminC, a benchmark infused with challenging cases that require fact verification models to discern and adjust to slight factual changes. We collect over 100,000 Wikipedia revisions that modify an underlying fact, and leverage these revisions, together with additional synthetically constructed ones, to create a total of over 400,000 claim-evidence pairs. Unlike previous resources, the examples in VitaminC are contrastive, i.e., they contain evidence pairs that are nearly identical in language and content, with the exception that one supports a given claim while the other does not. We show that training using this design increases robustness -- improving accuracy by 10% on adversarial fact verification and 6% on adversarial natural language inference (NLI). Moreover, the structure of VitaminC leads us to define additional tasks for fact-checking resources: tagging relevant words in the evidence for verifying the claim, identifying factual revisions, and providing automatic edits via factually consistent text generation.

We introduce HoVer (HOppy VERification), a dataset for many-hop evidence extraction and fact verification. It challenges models to extract facts from several Wikipedia articles that are relevant to a claim and classify whether the claim is Supported or Not-Supported by the facts. In HoVer, the claims require evidence to be extracted from as many as four English Wikipedia articles and embody reasoning graphs of diverse shapes. Moreover, most of the 3/4-hop claims are written in multiple sentences, which adds to the complexity of understanding long-range dependency relations such as coreference. We show that the performance of an existing state-of-the-art semantic-matching model degrades significantly on our dataset as the number of reasoning hops increases, hence demonstrating the necessity of many-hop reasoning to achieve strong results. We hope that the introduction of this challenging dataset and the accompanying evaluation task will encourage research in many-hop fact retrieval and information verification. We make the HoVer dataset publicly available at https://hover-nlp.github.io

The field of automated fact-checking increasingly depends on retrieving web-based evidence to determine the veracity of claims in real-world scenarios. A significant challenge in this process is not only retrieving relevant information, but also identifying evidence that can both support and refute complex claims. Traditional retrieval methods may return documents that directly address claims or lean toward supporting them, but often struggle with more complex claims requiring indirect reasoning. While some existing benchmarks and methods target retrieval for fact-checking, a comprehensive real-world open-domain benchmark has been lacking. In this paper, we present a real-world retrieval benchmark FactIR, derived from Factiverse production logs, enhanced with human annotations. We rigorously evaluate state-of-the-art retrieval models in a zero-shot setup on FactIR and offer insights for developing practical retrieval systems for fact-checking. Code and data are available at https://github.com/factiverse/factIR.

Scientific texts often convey authority due to their technical language and complex data. However, this complexity can sometimes lead to the spread of misinformation. Non-experts are particularly susceptible to misleading claims based on scientific tables due to their high information density and perceived credibility. Existing table claim verification models, including state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), often struggle with precise fine-grained reasoning, resulting in errors and a lack of precision in verifying scientific claims. Inspired by Cognitive Load Theory, we propose that enhancing a model's ability to interpret table-based claims involves reducing cognitive load by developing modular, reusable reasoning components (i.e., atomic skills). We introduce a skill-chaining schema that dynamically composes these skills to facilitate more accurate and generalizable reasoning with a reduced cognitive load. To evaluate this, we create SciAtomicBench, a cross-domain benchmark with fine-grained reasoning annotations. With only 350 fine-tuning examples, our model trained by atomic reasoning outperforms GPT-4o's chain-of-thought method, achieving state-of-the-art results with far less training data.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) effectively improves the accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, retrieval noises significantly impact the quality of LLMs' generation, necessitating the development of denoising mechanisms. Previous methods extract evidence straightforwardly without explicit thinking, which risks filtering out key clues and struggles with generalization. To this end, we propose EviOmni, which learns to extract rational evidence by (1) explicitly reasoning to identify potential cues within retrieval contents first, and then (2) consciously extracting to avoid omitting any key cues helpful for answering questions. Specifically, we frame evidence reasoning and evidence extraction into one unified response for end-to-end training; apply knowledge token masks for disentanglement to derive reasoning-based and extraction-based answers; and devise three types of verifiable reward functions, including answer, length, and format, to update the model via the policy optimization algorithm. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of EviOmni, providing compact and high-quality evidence, improving the accuracy of downstream tasks, and promoting effective application in online RAG systems.

Automated news verification requires structured claim extraction, but existing approaches either lack schema compliance or generalize poorly across domains. This paper presents NewsScope, a cross-domain dataset, benchmark, and fine-tuned model for schema-grounded news claim extraction. The dataset contains 455 articles across politics, health, science/environment, and business, consisting of 395 in-domain articles and 60 out-of-source articles for generalization testing. LLaMA 3.1 8B was fine-tuned using LoRA on 315 training examples and evaluated on held-out in-domain (80 articles) and out-of-source (60 articles) test sets. Human evaluation on 400 claims shows NewsScope achieves 89.4% human-evaluated accuracy compared to GPT-4o-mini's 93.7% (p=0.07). NewsScope outperforms GPT-4o-mini on political claims (94.3% vs. 87.8%). A numeric grounding filter further improves accuracy to 91.6%, narrowing the gap to 2.1 percentage points. Inter-annotator agreement studies (160 claims) confirm labeling reliability (94.6% positive agreement on SUPPORTED judgments). The open-weight model enables offline deployment at approximately 15 on-demand compute (or 0 on free tiers). Code and benchmark are publicly released.

Fact verification aims to automatically probe the veracity of a claim based on several pieces of evidence. Existing works are always engaging in the accuracy improvement, let alone the explainability, a critical capability of fact verification system. Constructing an explainable fact verification system in a complex multi-hop scenario is consistently impeded by the absence of a relevant high-quality dataset. Previous dataset either suffer from excessive simplification or fail to incorporate essential considerations for explainability. To address this, we present EX-FEVER, a pioneering dataset for multi-hop explainable fact verification. With over 60,000 claims involving 2-hop and 3-hop reasoning, each is created by summarizing and modifying information from hyperlinked Wikipedia documents. Each instance is accompanied by a veracity label and an explanation that outlines the reasoning path supporting the veracity classification. Additionally, we demonstrate a novel baseline system on our EX-FEVER dataset, showcasing document retrieval, explanation generation, and claim verification and observe that existing fact verification models trained on previous datasets struggle to perform well on our dataset. Furthermore, we highlight the potential of utilizing Large Language Models in the fact verification task. We hope our dataset could make a significant contribution by providing ample opportunities to explore the integration of natural language explanations in the domain of fact verification.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating coherent summaries from very long contexts given a user query. Extracting and properly citing evidence spans could help improve the transparency and reliability of these summaries. At the same time, LLMs suffer from positional biases in terms of which information they understand and attend to, which could affect evidence citation. Whereas previous work has focused on evidence citation with predefined levels of granularity (e.g. sentence, paragraph, document, etc.), we propose the task of long-context query focused summarization with unstructured evidence citation. We show how existing systems struggle to generate and properly cite unstructured evidence from their context, and that evidence tends to be "lost-in-the-middle". To help mitigate this, we create the Summaries with Unstructured Evidence Text dataset (SUnsET), a synthetic dataset generated using a novel domain-agnostic pipeline which can be used as supervision to adapt LLMs to this task. We demonstrate across 5 LLMs of different sizes and 4 datasets with varying document types and lengths that LLMs adapted with SUnsET data generate more relevant and factually consistent evidence than their base models, extract evidence from more diverse locations in their context, and can generate more relevant and consistent summaries.

Effective scientific communication depends on accurate citations that validate sources and guide readers to supporting evidence. Yet academic literature faces mounting challenges: semantic citation errors that misrepresent sources, AI-generated hallucinated references, and traditional citation formats that point to entire papers without indicating which sections substantiate specific claims. We introduce SemanticCite, an AI-powered system that verifies citation accuracy through full-text source analysis while providing rich contextual information via detailed reasoning and relevant text snippets. Our approach combines multiple retrieval methods with a four-class classification system (Supported, Partially Supported, Unsupported, Uncertain) that captures nuanced claim-source relationships and enables appropriate remedial actions for different error types. Our experiments show that fine-tuned lightweight language models achieve performance comparable to large commercial systems with significantly lower computational requirements, making large-scale citation verification practically feasible. The system provides transparent, evidence-based explanations that support user understanding and trust. We contribute a comprehensive dataset of over 1,000 citations with detailed alignments, functional classifications, semantic annotations, and bibliometric metadata across eight disciplines, alongside fine-tuned models and the complete verification framework as open-source software. SemanticCite addresses critical challenges in research integrity through scalable citation verification, streamlined peer review, and quality control for AI-generated content, providing an open-source foundation for maintaining citation accuracy at scale.

With the rise of generative AI, automated fact-checking methods to combat misinformation are becoming more and more important. However, factual claim detection, the first step in a fact-checking pipeline, suffers from two key issues that limit its scalability and generalizability: (1) inconsistency in definitions of the task and what a claim is, and (2) the high cost of manual annotation. To address (1), we review the definitions in related work and propose a unifying definition of factual claims that focuses on verifiability. To address (2), we introduce AFaCTA (Automatic Factual Claim deTection Annotator), a novel framework that assists in the annotation of factual claims with the help of large language models (LLMs). AFaCTA calibrates its annotation confidence with consistency along three predefined reasoning paths. Extensive evaluation and experiments in the domain of political speech reveal that AFaCTA can efficiently assist experts in annotating factual claims and training high-quality classifiers, and can work with or without expert supervision. Our analyses also result in PoliClaim, a comprehensive claim detection dataset spanning diverse political topics.

Fact-checkers are often hampered by the sheer amount of online content that needs to be fact-checked. NLP can help them by retrieving already existing fact-checks relevant to the content being investigated. This paper introduces a new multilingual dataset -- MultiClaim -- for previously fact-checked claim retrieval. We collected 28k posts in 27 languages from social media, 206k fact-checks in 39 languages written by professional fact-checkers, as well as 31k connections between these two groups. This is the most extensive and the most linguistically diverse dataset of this kind to date. We evaluated how different unsupervised methods fare on this dataset and its various dimensions. We show that evaluating such a diverse dataset has its complexities and proper care needs to be taken before interpreting the results. We also evaluated a supervised fine-tuning approach, improving upon the unsupervised method significantly.

The increased use of large language models (LLMs) across a variety of real-world applications calls for mechanisms to verify the factual accuracy of their outputs. In this work, we present a holistic end-to-end solution for annotating the factuality of LLM-generated responses, which encompasses a multi-stage annotation scheme designed to yield detailed labels concerning the verifiability and factual inconsistencies found in LLM outputs. We design and build an annotation tool to speed up the labelling procedure and ease the workload of raters. It allows flexible incorporation of automatic results in any stage, e.g. automatically-retrieved evidence. We further construct an open-domain document-level factuality benchmark in three-level granularity: claim, sentence and document. Preliminary experiments show that FacTool, FactScore and Perplexity.ai are struggling to identify false claims with the best F1=0.53. Annotation tool, benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/yuxiaw/Factcheck-GPT.

Fact-checking is the task of verifying the veracity of claims by assessing their assertions against credible evidence. The vast majority of fact-checking studies focus exclusively on political claims. Very little research explores fact-checking for other topics, specifically subject matters for which expertise is required. We present the first study of explainable fact-checking for claims which require specific expertise. For our case study we choose the setting of public health. To support this case study we construct a new dataset PUBHEALTH of 11.8K claims accompanied by journalist crafted, gold standard explanations (i.e., judgments) to support the fact-check labels for claims. We explore two tasks: veracity prediction and explanation generation. We also define and evaluate, with humans and computationally, three coherence properties of explanation quality. Our results indicate that, by training on in-domain data, gains can be made in explainable, automated fact-checking for claims which require specific expertise.

In this paper, we examine several methods of acquiring Czech data for automated fact-checking, which is a task commonly modeled as a classification of textual claim veracity w.r.t. a corpus of trusted ground truths. We attempt to collect sets of data in form of a factual claim, evidence within the ground truth corpus, and its veracity label (supported, refuted or not enough info). As a first attempt, we generate a Czech version of the large-scale FEVER dataset built on top of Wikipedia corpus. We take a hybrid approach of machine translation and document alignment; the approach and the tools we provide can be easily applied to other languages. We discuss its weaknesses and inaccuracies, propose a future approach for their cleaning and publish the 127k resulting translations, as well as a version of such dataset reliably applicable for the Natural Language Inference task - the CsFEVER-NLI. Furthermore, we collect a novel dataset of 3,097 claims, which is annotated using the corpus of 2.2M articles of Czech News Agency. We present its extended annotation methodology based on the FEVER approach, and, as the underlying corpus is kept a trade secret, we also publish a standalone version of the dataset for the task of Natural Language Inference we call CTKFactsNLI. We analyze both acquired datasets for spurious cues - annotation patterns leading to model overfitting. CTKFacts is further examined for inter-annotator agreement, thoroughly cleaned, and a typology of common annotator errors is extracted. Finally, we provide baseline models for all stages of the fact-checking pipeline and publish the NLI datasets, as well as our annotation platform and other experimental data.

Legal claims refer to the plaintiff's demands in a case and are essential to guiding judicial reasoning and case resolution. While many works have focused on improving the efficiency of legal professionals, the research on helping non-professionals (e.g., plaintiffs) remains unexplored. This paper explores the problem of legal claim generation based on the given case's facts. First, we construct ClaimGen-CN, the first dataset for Chinese legal claim generation task, from various real-world legal disputes. Additionally, we design an evaluation metric tailored for assessing the generated claims, which encompasses two essential dimensions: factuality and clarity. Building on this, we conduct a comprehensive zero-shot evaluation of state-of-the-art general and legal-domain large language models. Our findings highlight the limitations of the current models in factual precision and expressive clarity, pointing to the need for more targeted development in this domain. To encourage further exploration of this important task, we will make the dataset publicly available.

Textual entailment models are increasingly applied in settings like fact-checking, presupposition verification in question answering, or summary evaluation. However, these represent a significant domain shift from existing entailment datasets, and models underperform as a result. We propose WiCE, a new fine-grained textual entailment dataset built on natural claim and evidence pairs extracted from Wikipedia. In addition to standard claim-level entailment, WiCE provides entailment judgments over sub-sentence units of the claim, and a minimal subset of evidence sentences that support each subclaim. To support this, we propose an automatic claim decomposition strategy using GPT-3.5 which we show is also effective at improving entailment models' performance on multiple datasets at test time. Finally, we show that real claims in our dataset involve challenging verification and retrieval problems that existing models fail to address.

Peer reviewing is a central process in modern research and essential for ensuring high quality and reliability of published work. At the same time, it is a time-consuming process and increasing interest in emerging fields often results in a high review workload, especially for senior researchers in this area. How to cope with this problem is an open question and it is vividly discussed across all major conferences. In this work, we propose an Argument Mining based approach for the assistance of editors, meta-reviewers, and reviewers. We demonstrate that the decision process in the field of scientific publications is driven by arguments and automatic argument identification is helpful in various use-cases. One of our findings is that arguments used in the peer-review process differ from arguments in other domains making the transfer of pre-trained models difficult. Therefore, we provide the community with a new peer-review dataset from different computer science conferences with annotated arguments. In our extensive empirical evaluation, we show that Argument Mining can be used to efficiently extract the most relevant parts from reviews, which are paramount for the publication decision. The process remains interpretable since the extracted arguments can be highlighted in a review without detaching them from their context.

False claims that have been previously fact-checked can still spread on social media. To mitigate their continual spread, detecting previously fact-checked claims is indispensable. Given a claim, existing works focus on providing evidence for detection by reranking candidate fact-checking articles (FC-articles) retrieved by BM25. However, these performances may be limited because they ignore the following characteristics of FC-articles: (1) claims are often quoted to describe the checked events, providing lexical information besides semantics; (2) sentence templates to introduce or debunk claims are common across articles, providing pattern information. Models that ignore the two aspects only leverage semantic relevance and may be misled by sentences that describe similar but irrelevant events. In this paper, we propose a novel reranker, MTM (Memory-enhanced Transformers for Matching) to rank FC-articles using key sentences selected with event (lexical and semantic) and pattern information. For event information, we propose a ROUGE-guided Transformer which is finetuned with regression of ROUGE. For pattern information, we generate pattern vectors for matching with sentences. By fusing event and pattern information, we select key sentences to represent an article and then predict if the article fact-checks the given claim using the claim, key sentences, and patterns. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that MTM outperforms existing methods. Human evaluation proves that MTM can capture key sentences for explanations. The code and the dataset are at https://github.com/ICTMCG/MTM.

We introduce SciVer, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the ability of foundation models to verify claims within a multimodal scientific context. SciVer consists of 3,000 expert-annotated examples over 1,113 scientific papers, covering four subsets, each representing a common reasoning type in multimodal scientific claim verification. To enable fine-grained evaluation, each example includes expert-annotated supporting evidence. We assess the performance of 21 state-of-the-art multimodal foundation models, including o4-mini, Gemini-2.5-Flash, Llama-3.2-Vision, and Qwen2.5-VL. Our experiment reveals a substantial performance gap between these models and human experts on SciVer. Through an in-depth analysis of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and human-conducted error evaluations, we identify critical limitations in current open-source models, offering key insights to advance models' comprehension and reasoning in multimodal scientific literature tasks.

Most successful information extraction systems operate with access to a large collection of documents. In this work, we explore the task of acquiring and incorporating external evidence to improve extraction accuracy in domains where the amount of training data is scarce. This process entails issuing search queries, extraction from new sources and reconciliation of extracted values, which are repeated until sufficient evidence is collected. We approach the problem using a reinforcement learning framework where our model learns to select optimal actions based on contextual information. We employ a deep Q-network, trained to optimize a reward function that reflects extraction accuracy while penalizing extra effort. Our experiments on two databases -- of shooting incidents, and food adulteration cases -- demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms traditional extractors and a competitive meta-classifier baseline.

LLM developers are increasingly reliant on synthetic data, but generating high-quality data for complex long-context reasoning tasks remains challenging. We introduce CLIPPER, a compression-based approach for generating synthetic data tailored to narrative claim verification - a task that requires reasoning over a book to verify a given claim. Instead of generating claims directly from the raw text of the book, which results in artifact-riddled claims, CLIPPER first compresses the book into chapter outlines and book summaries and then uses these intermediate representations to generate complex claims and corresponding chain-of-thoughts. Compared to naive approaches, CLIPPER produces claims that are more valid, grounded, and complex. Using CLIPPER, we construct a dataset of 19K synthetic book claims paired with their source texts and chain-of-thought reasoning, and use it to fine-tune three open-weight models. Our best model achieves breakthrough results on narrative claim verification (from 28% to 76% accuracy on our test set) and sets a new state-of-the-art for sub-10B models on the NoCha leaderboard. Further analysis shows that our models generate more detailed and grounded chain-of-thought reasoning while also improving performance on other narrative understanding tasks (e.g., NarrativeQA).

With the explosive growth of scientific publications, making the synthesis of scientific knowledge and fact checking becomes an increasingly complex task. In this paper, we propose a multi-task approach for verifying the scientific questions based on a joint reasoning from facts and evidence in research articles. We propose an intelligent combination of (1) an automatic information summarization and (2) a Boolean Question Answering which allows to generate an answer to a scientific question from only extracts obtained after summarization. Thus on a given topic, our proposed approach conducts structured content modeling based on paper abstracts to answer a scientific question while highlighting texts from paper that discuss the topic. We based our final system on an end-to-end Extractive Question Answering (EQA) combined with a three outputs classification model to perform in-depth semantic understanding of a question to illustrate the aggregation of multiple responses. With our light and fast proposed architecture, we achieved an average error rate of 4% and a F1-score of 95.6%. Our results are supported via experiments with two QA models (BERT, RoBERTa) over 3 Million Open Access (OA) articles in the medical and health domains on Europe PMC.

Research on causality extraction from text has so far almost entirely neglected counterclaims. Existing causality extraction datasets focus solely on "procausal" claims, i.e., statements that support a relationship. "Concausal" claims, i.e., statements that refute a relationship, are entirely ignored or even accidentally annotated as procausal. We address this shortcoming by developing a new dataset that integrates concausality. Based on an extensive literature review, we first show that concausality is an integral part of causal reasoning on incomplete knowledge. We operationalize this theory in the form of a rigorous guideline for annotation and then augment the Causal News Corpus with concausal statements, obtaining a substantial inter-annotator agreement of Cohen's κ=0.74. To demonstrate the importance of integrating concausal statements, we show that models trained without concausal relationships tend to misclassify these as procausal instead. Based on our new dataset, this mistake can be mitigated, enabling transformers to effectively distinguish pro- and concausality.

We consider the problem of automatically generating a narrative biomedical evidence summary from multiple trial reports. We evaluate modern neural models for abstractive summarization of relevant article abstracts from systematic reviews previously conducted by members of the Cochrane collaboration, using the authors conclusions section of the review abstract as our target. We enlist medical professionals to evaluate generated summaries, and we find that modern summarization systems yield consistently fluent and relevant synopses, but that they are not always factual. We propose new approaches that capitalize on domain-specific models to inform summarization, e.g., by explicitly demarcating snippets of inputs that convey key findings, and emphasizing the reports of large and high-quality trials. We find that these strategies modestly improve the factual accuracy of generated summaries. Finally, we propose a new method for automatically evaluating the factuality of generated narrative evidence syntheses using models that infer the directionality of reported findings.

Fact verification aims to verify a claim using evidence from a trustworthy knowledge base. To address this challenge, algorithms must produce features for every claim that are both semantically meaningful, and compact enough to find a semantic alignment with the source information. In contrast to previous work, which tackled the alignment problem by learning over annotated corpora of claims and their corresponding labels, we propose SFAVEL (Self-supervised Fact Verification via Language Model Distillation), a novel unsupervised pretraining framework that leverages pre-trained language models to distil self-supervised features into high-quality claim-fact alignments without the need for annotations. This is enabled by a novel contrastive loss function that encourages features to attain high-quality claim and evidence alignments whilst preserving the semantic relationships across the corpora. Notably, we present results that achieve a new state-of-the-art on FB15k-237 (+5.3% Hits@1) and FEVER (+8% accuracy) with linear evaluation.

The proliferation of disinformation demands reliable and scalable fact-checking solutions. We present Dynamic Evidence-based FAct-checking with Multimodal Experts (DEFAME), a modular, zero-shot MLLM pipeline for open-domain, text-image claim verification. DEFAME operates in a six-stage process, dynamically selecting the tools and search depth to extract and evaluate textual and visual evidence. Unlike prior approaches that are text-only, lack explainability, or rely solely on parametric knowledge, DEFAME performs end-to-end verification, accounting for images in claims and evidence while generating structured, multimodal reports. Evaluation on the popular benchmarks VERITE, AVerITeC, and MOCHEG shows that DEFAME surpasses all previous methods, establishing itself as the new state-of-the-art fact-checking system for uni- and multimodal fact-checking. Moreover, we introduce a new multimodal benchmark, ClaimReview2024+, featuring claims after the knowledge cutoff of GPT-4o, avoiding data leakage. Here, DEFAME drastically outperforms the GPT-4o baselines, showing temporal generalizability and the potential for real-time fact-checking.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in assisting scientific research, yet their ability to discover high-quality research hypotheses remains unexamined due to the lack of a dedicated benchmark. To address this gap, we introduce the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating LLMs with a near-sufficient set of sub-tasks of scientific discovery: inspiration retrieval, hypothesis composition, and hypothesis ranking. We develop an automated framework that extracts critical components - research questions, background surveys, inspirations, and hypotheses - from scientific papers across 12 disciplines, with expert validation confirming its accuracy. To prevent data contamination, we focus exclusively on papers published in 2024, ensuring minimal overlap with LLM pretraining data. Our evaluation reveals that LLMs perform well in retrieving inspirations, an out-of-distribution task, suggesting their ability to surface novel knowledge associations. This positions LLMs as "research hypothesis mines", capable of facilitating automated scientific discovery by generating innovative hypotheses at scale with minimal human intervention.

This paper presents our system for Task 3 of the CLEF 2025 CheckThat! Lab, which focuses on verifying numerical and temporal claims using retrieved evidence. We explore two complementary approaches: zero-shot prompting with instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) and supervised fine-tuning using parameter-efficient LoRA. To enhance evidence quality, we investigate several selection strategies, including full-document input and top-k sentence filtering using BM25 and MiniLM. Our best-performing model LLaMA fine-tuned with LoRA achieves strong performance on the English validation set. However, a notable drop in the test set highlights a generalization challenge. These findings underscore the importance of evidence granularity and model adaptation for robust numerical fact verification.

Despite substantial progress in fact-verification benchmarks, claims grounded in large-scale structured data remain underexplored. In this work, we introduce ClaimDB, the first fact-verification benchmark where the evidence for claims is derived from compositions of millions of records and multiple tables. ClaimDB consists of 80 unique real-life databases covering a wide range of domains, from governance and healthcare to media, education and the natural sciences. At this scale, verification approaches that rely on "reading" the evidence break down, forcing a timely shift toward reasoning in executable programs. We conduct extensive experiments with 30 state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source (below 70B) LLMs and find that none exceed 83% accuracy, with more than half below 55%. Our analysis also reveals that both closed- and open-source models struggle with abstention -- the ability to admit that there is no evidence to decide -- raising doubts about their reliability in high-stakes data analysis. We release the benchmark, code, and the LLM leaderboard at https://claimdb.github.io .

AI holds promise for transforming scientific processes, including hypothesis generation. Prior work on hypothesis generation can be broadly categorized into theory-driven and data-driven approaches. While both have proven effective in generating novel and plausible hypotheses, it remains an open question whether they can complement each other. To address this, we develop the first method that combines literature-based insights with data to perform LLM-powered hypothesis generation. We apply our method on five different datasets and demonstrate that integrating literature and data outperforms other baselines (8.97\% over few-shot, 15.75\% over literature-based alone, and 3.37\% over data-driven alone). Additionally, we conduct the first human evaluation to assess the utility of LLM-generated hypotheses in assisting human decision-making on two challenging tasks: deception detection and AI generated content detection. Our results show that human accuracy improves significantly by 7.44\% and 14.19\% on these tasks, respectively. These findings suggest that integrating literature-based and data-driven approaches provides a comprehensive and nuanced framework for hypothesis generation and could open new avenues for scientific inquiry.

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved great success on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) over the past few years. Although the general language representation learned from large-scale corpora does benefit MRC, the poor support in evidence extraction which requires reasoning across multiple sentences hinders PLMs from further advancing MRC. To bridge the gap between general PLMs and MRC, we present REPT, a REtrieval-based Pre-Training approach. In particular, we introduce two self-supervised tasks to strengthen evidence extraction during pre-training, which is further inherited by downstream MRC tasks through the consistent retrieval operation and model architecture. To evaluate our proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on five MRC datasets that require collecting evidence from and reasoning across multiple sentences. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pre-training approach. Moreover, further analysis shows that our approach is able to enhance the capacity of evidence extraction without explicit supervision.

Claim verification is essential in combating misinformation, and large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged in this area as powerful tools for assessing the veracity of claims using external knowledge. Existing LLM-based methods for claim verification typically adopt a Decompose-Then-Verify paradigm, which involves decomposing complex claims into several independent sub-claims and verifying each sub-claim separately. However, this paradigm often introduces errors during the claim decomposition process. To mitigate these errors, we propose to develop the Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-Verify paradigm, which leverages LLM reasoning methods to generate CoT-verification paths for the original complex claim without requiring decompositions into sub-claims and separate verification stages. The CoT-Verify paradigm allows us to propose a natural fine-tuning method called Reasoning-CV to enhance the verification capabilities in LLMs. Reasoning-CV includes a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage and a self-improvement direct preference optimization (DPO) stage. Utilizing only an 8B pre-trained LLM, Reasoning-CV demonstrates superior knowledge-assisted claim verification performances compared to existing Decompose-Then-Verify methods, as well as powerful black-box LLMs such as GPT-4o+CoT and o1-preview. Our code is available.

Competitive Debate's increasingly technical nature has left competitors looking for tools to accelerate evidence production. We find that the unique type of extractive summarization performed by competitive debaters - summarization with a bias towards a particular target meaning - can be performed using the latest innovations in unsupervised pre-trained text vectorization models. We introduce CX_DB8, a queryable word-level extractive summarizer and evidence creation framework, which allows for rapid, biasable summarization of arbitarily sized texts. CX_DB8s usage of the embedding framework Flair means that as the underlying models improve, CX_DB8 will also improve. We observe that CX_DB8 also functions as a semantic search engine, and has application as a supplement to traditional "find" functionality in programs and webpages. CX_DB8 is currently used by competitive debaters and is made available to the public at https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8

In this paper, we present the Logically submissions to De-Factify 2 challenge (DE-FACTIFY 2023) on the task 1 of Multi-Modal Fact Checking. We describes our submissions to this challenge including explored evidence retrieval and selection techniques, pre-trained cross-modal and unimodal models, and a cross-modal veracity model based on the well established Transformer Encoder (TE) architecture which is heavily relies on the concept of self-attention. Exploratory analysis is also conducted on this Factify 2 data set that uncovers the salient multi-modal patterns and hypothesis motivating the architecture proposed in this work. A series of preliminary experiments were done to investigate and benchmarking different pre-trained embedding models, evidence retrieval settings and thresholds. The final system, a standard two-stage evidence based veracity detection system, yields weighted avg. 0.79 on both val set and final blind test set on the task 1, which achieves 3rd place with a small margin to the top performing system on the leaderboard among 9 participants.

Whether the media faithfully communicate scientific information has long been a core issue to the science community. Automatically identifying paraphrased scientific findings could enable large-scale tracking and analysis of information changes in the science communication process, but this requires systems to understand the similarity between scientific information across multiple domains. To this end, we present the SCIENTIFIC PARAPHRASE AND INFORMATION CHANGE DATASET (SPICED), the first paraphrase dataset of scientific findings annotated for degree of information change. SPICED contains 6,000 scientific finding pairs extracted from news stories, social media discussions, and full texts of original papers. We demonstrate that SPICED poses a challenging task and that models trained on SPICED improve downstream performance on evidence retrieval for fact checking of real-world scientific claims. Finally, we show that models trained on SPICED can reveal large-scale trends in the degrees to which people and organizations faithfully communicate new scientific findings. Data, code, and pre-trained models are available at http://www.copenlu.com/publication/2022_emnlp_wright/.

Research is a fundamental process driving the advancement of human civilization, yet it demands substantial time and effort from researchers. In recent years, the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has inspired researchers to explore how AI can accelerate and enhance research. To monitor relevant advancements, this paper presents a systematic review of the progress in this domain. Specifically, we organize the relevant studies into three main categories: hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and manuscript publication. Hypothesis formulation involves knowledge synthesis and hypothesis generation. Hypothesis validation includes the verification of scientific claims, theorem proving, and experiment validation. Manuscript publication encompasses manuscript writing and the peer review process. Furthermore, we identify and discuss the current challenges faced in these areas, as well as potential future directions for research. Finally, we also offer a comprehensive overview of existing benchmarks and tools across various domains that support the integration of AI into the research process. We hope this paper serves as an introduction for beginners and fosters future research. Resources have been made publicly available at https://github.com/zkzhou126/AI-for-Research.

Fact-checking plays a crucial role in combating misinformation. Existing methods using large language models (LLMs) for claim decomposition face two key limitations: (1) insufficient decomposition, introducing unnecessary complexity to the verification process, and (2) ambiguity of mentions, leading to incorrect verification results. To address these challenges, we suggest introducing a claim graph consisting of triplets to address the insufficient decomposition problem and reduce mention ambiguity through graph structure. Based on this core idea, we propose a graph-based framework, GraphFC, for fact-checking. The framework features three key components: graph construction, which builds both claim and evidence graphs; graph-guided planning, which prioritizes the triplet verification order; and graph-guided checking, which verifies the triples one by one between claim and evidence graphs. Extensive experiments show that GraphFC enables fine-grained decomposition while resolving referential ambiguities through relational constraints, achieving state-of-the-art performance across three datasets.

Our collective attention span is shortened by the flood of online information. With FarFetched, we address the need for automated claim validation based on the aggregated evidence derived from multiple online news sources. We introduce an entity-centric reasoning framework in which latent connections between events, actions, or statements are revealed via entity mentions and represented in a graph database. Using entity linking and semantic similarity, we offer a way for collecting and combining information from diverse sources in order to generate evidence relevant to the user's claim. Then, we leverage textual entailment recognition to quantitatively determine whether this assertion is credible, based on the created evidence. Our approach tries to fill the gap in automated claim validation for less-resourced languages and is showcased on the Greek language, complemented by the training of relevant semantic textual similarity (STS) and natural language inference (NLI) models that are evaluated on translated versions of common benchmarks.

Meta-analyses statistically aggregate the findings of different randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to assess treatment effectiveness. Because this yields robust estimates of treatment effectiveness, results from meta-analyses are considered the strongest form of evidence. However, rigorous evidence syntheses are time-consuming and labor-intensive, requiring manual extraction of data from individual trials to be synthesized. Ideally, language technologies would permit fully automatic meta-analysis, on demand. This requires accurately extracting numerical results from individual trials, which has been beyond the capabilities of natural language processing (NLP) models to date. In this work, we evaluate whether modern large language models (LLMs) can reliably perform this task. We annotate (and release) a modest but granular evaluation dataset of clinical trial reports with numerical findings attached to interventions, comparators, and outcomes. Using this dataset, we evaluate the performance of seven LLMs applied zero-shot for the task of conditionally extracting numerical findings from trial reports. We find that massive LLMs that can accommodate lengthy inputs are tantalizingly close to realizing fully automatic meta-analysis, especially for dichotomous (binary) outcomes (e.g., mortality). However, LLMs -- including ones trained on biomedical texts -- perform poorly when the outcome measures are complex and tallying the results requires inference. This work charts a path toward fully automatic meta-analysis of RCTs via LLMs, while also highlighting the limitations of existing models for this aim.

Retractions play a vital role in maintaining scientific integrity, yet systematic studies of retractions in computer science and other STEM fields remain scarce. We present WithdrarXiv, the first large-scale dataset of withdrawn papers from arXiv, containing over 14,000 papers and their associated retraction comments spanning the repository's entire history through September 2024. Through careful analysis of author comments, we develop a comprehensive taxonomy of retraction reasons, identifying 10 distinct categories ranging from critical errors to policy violations. We demonstrate a simple yet highly accurate zero-shot automatic categorization of retraction reasons, achieving a weighted average F1-score of 0.96. Additionally, we release WithdrarXiv-SciFy, an enriched version including scripts for parsed full-text PDFs, specifically designed to enable research in scientific feasibility studies, claim verification, and automated theorem proving. These findings provide valuable insights for improving scientific quality control and automated verification systems. Finally, and most importantly, we discuss ethical issues and take a number of steps to implement responsible data release while fostering open science in this area.

Recent advancements in text summarization, particularly with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), have shown remarkable performance. However, a notable challenge persists as a substantial number of automatically-generated summaries exhibit factual inconsistencies, such as hallucinations. In response to this issue, various approaches for the evaluation of consistency for summarization have emerged. Yet, these newly-introduced metrics face several limitations, including lack of interpretability, focus on short document summaries (e.g., news articles), and computational impracticality, especially for LLM-based metrics. To address these shortcomings, we propose Factuality Evaluation of summarization based on Natural language Inference and Claim Extraction (FENICE), a more interpretable and efficient factuality-oriented metric. FENICE leverages an NLI-based alignment between information in the source document and a set of atomic facts, referred to as claims, extracted from the summary. Our metric sets a new state of the art on AGGREFACT, the de-facto benchmark for factuality evaluation. Moreover, we extend our evaluation to a more challenging setting by conducting a human annotation process of long-form summarization.

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, large volumes of biomedical information concerning this new disease have been published on social media. Some of this information can pose a real danger to people's health, particularly when false information is shared, for instance recommendations on how to treat diseases without professional medical advice. Therefore, automatic fact-checking resources and systems developed specifically for the medical domain are crucial. While existing fact-checking resources cover COVID-19-related information in news or quantify the amount of misinformation in tweets, there is no dataset providing fact-checked COVID-19-related Twitter posts with detailed annotations for biomedical entities, relations and relevant evidence. We contribute CoVERT, a fact-checked corpus of tweets with a focus on the domain of biomedicine and COVID-19-related (mis)information. The corpus consists of 300 tweets, each annotated with medical named entities and relations. We employ a novel crowdsourcing methodology to annotate all tweets with fact-checking labels and supporting evidence, which crowdworkers search for online. This methodology results in moderate inter-annotator agreement. Furthermore, we use the retrieved evidence extracts as part of a fact-checking pipeline, finding that the real-world evidence is more useful than the knowledge indirectly available in pretrained language models.

We propose CRAVE (Cluster-based Retrieval Augmented Verification with Explanation); a novel framework that integrates retrieval-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) with clustering techniques to address fact-checking challenges on social media. CRAVE automatically retrieves multimodal evidence from diverse, often contradictory, sources. Evidence is clustered into coherent narratives, and evaluated via an LLM-based judge to deliver fact-checking verdicts explained by evidence summaries. By synthesizing evidence from both text and image modalities and incorporating agent-based refinement, CRAVE ensures consistency and diversity in evidence representation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate CRAVE's efficacy in retrieval precision, clustering quality, and judgment accuracy, showcasing its potential as a robust decision-support tool for fact-checkers.

In the midst of widespread misinformation and disinformation through social media and the proliferation of AI-generated texts, it has become increasingly difficult for people to validate and trust information they encounter. Many fact-checking approaches and tools have been developed, but they often lack appropriate explainability or granularity to be useful in various contexts. A text validation method that is easy to use, accessible, and can perform fine-grained evidence attribution has become crucial. More importantly, building user trust in such a method requires presenting the rationale behind each prediction, as research shows this significantly influences people's belief in automated systems. It is also paramount to localize and bring users' attention to the specific problematic content, instead of providing simple blanket labels. In this paper, we present ClaimVer, a human-centric framework tailored to meet users' informational and verification needs by generating rich annotations and thereby reducing cognitive load. Designed to deliver comprehensive evaluations of texts, it highlights each claim, verifies it against a trusted knowledge graph (KG), presents the evidence, and provides succinct, clear explanations for each claim prediction. Finally, our framework introduces an attribution score, enhancing applicability across a wide range of downstream tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful candidates for complex decision-making, leveraging vast encoded knowledge and remarkable zero-shot abilities. However, their adoption in high-stakes environments is hindered by their opacity; their outputs lack faithful explanations and cannot be effectively contested to correct errors, undermining trustworthiness. In this paper, we propose ART (Adaptive Reasoning Trees), a hierarchical method for claim verification. The process begins with a root claim, which branches into supporting and attacking child arguments. An argument's strength is determined bottom-up via a pairwise tournament of its children, adjudicated by a judge LLM, allowing a final, transparent and contestable verdict to be systematically derived which is missing in methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We empirically validate ART on multiple datasets, analyzing different argument generators and comparison strategies. Our findings show that ART's structured reasoning outperforms strong baselines, establishing a new benchmark for explainable claim verification which is more reliable and ensures clarity in the overall decision making step.

Although much research has focused on AI explanations to support decisions in complex information-seeking tasks such as fact-checking, the role of evidence is surprisingly under-researched. In our study, we systematically varied explanation type, AI prediction certainty, and correctness of AI system advice for non-expert participants, who evaluated the veracity of claims and AI system predictions. Participants were provided the option of easily inspecting the underlying evidence. We found that participants consistently relied on evidence to validate AI claims across all experimental conditions. When participants were presented with natural language explanations, evidence was used less frequently although they relied on it when these explanations seemed insufficient or flawed. Qualitative data suggests that participants attempted to infer evidence source reliability, despite source identities being deliberately omitted. Our results demonstrate that evidence is a key ingredient in how people evaluate the reliability of information presented by an AI system and, in combination with natural language explanations, offers valuable support for decision-making. Further research is urgently needed to understand how evidence ought to be presented and how people engage with it in practice.

Hypothesis generation is a fundamental step in scientific discovery, yet it is increasingly challenged by information overload and disciplinary fragmentation. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in their potential to enhance and automate this process. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of hypothesis generation with LLMs by (i) reviewing existing methods, from simple prompting techniques to more complex frameworks, and proposing a taxonomy that categorizes these approaches; (ii) analyzing techniques for improving hypothesis quality, such as novelty boosting and structured reasoning; (iii) providing an overview of evaluation strategies; and (iv) discussing key challenges and future directions, including multimodal integration and human-AI collaboration. Our survey aims to serve as a reference for researchers exploring LLMs for hypothesis generation.

Definitions are the foundation for any scientific work, but with a significant increase in publication numbers, gathering definitions relevant to any keyword has become challenging. We therefore introduce SciDef, an LLM-based pipeline for automated definition extraction. We test SciDef on DefExtra & DefSim, novel datasets of human-extracted definitions and definition-pairs' similarity, respectively. Evaluating 16 language models across prompting strategies, we demonstrate that multi-step and DSPy-optimized prompting improve extraction performance. To evaluate extraction, we test various metrics and show that an NLI-based method yields the most reliable results. We show that LLMs are largely able to extract definitions from scientific literature (86.4% of definitions from our test-set); yet future work should focus not just on finding definitions, but on identifying relevant ones, as models tend to over-generate them. Code & datasets are available at https://github.com/Media-Bias-Group/SciDef.

Our society is facing rampant misinformation harming public health and trust. To address the societal challenge, we introduce FACT-GPT, a system leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the claim matching stage of fact-checking. FACT-GPT, trained on a synthetic dataset, identifies social media content that aligns with, contradicts, or is irrelevant to previously debunked claims. Our evaluation shows that our specialized LLMs can match the accuracy of larger models in identifying related claims, closely mirroring human judgment. This research provides an automated solution for efficient claim matching, demonstrates the potential of LLMs in supporting fact-checkers, and offers valuable resources for further research in the field.

We propose end-to-end multimodal fact-checking and explanation generation, where the input is a claim and a large collection of web sources, including articles, images, videos, and tweets, and the goal is to assess the truthfulness of the claim by retrieving relevant evidence and predicting a truthfulness label (e.g., support, refute or not enough information), and to generate a statement to summarize and explain the reasoning and ruling process. To support this research, we construct Mocheg, a large-scale dataset consisting of 15,601 claims where each claim is annotated with a truthfulness label and a ruling statement, and 33,880 textual paragraphs and 12,112 images in total as evidence. To establish baseline performances on Mocheg, we experiment with several state-of-the-art neural architectures on the three pipelined subtasks: multimodal evidence retrieval, claim verification, and explanation generation, and demonstrate that the performance of the state-of-the-art end-to-end multimodal fact-checking does not provide satisfactory outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to build the benchmark dataset and solutions for end-to-end multimodal fact-checking and explanation generation. The dataset, source code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/VT-NLP/Mocheg.

Evaluating whether multimodal large language models truly understand long-form scientific papers remains challenging: answer-only metrics and synthetic "Needle-In-A-Haystack" tests often reward answer matching without requiring a causal, evidence-linked reasoning trace in the document. We propose the "Fish-in-the-Ocean" (FITO) paradigm, which requires models to construct explicit cross-modal evidence chains within native scientific documents. To operationalize FITO, we build SIN-Data, a scientific interleaved corpus that preserves the native interleaving of text and figures. On top of it, we construct SIN-Bench with four progressive tasks covering evidence discovery (SIN-Find), hypothesis verification (SIN-Verify), grounded QA (SIN-QA), and evidence-anchored synthesis (SIN-Summary). We further introduce "No Evidence, No Score", scoring predictions when grounded to verifiable anchors and diagnosing evidence quality via matching, relevance, and logic. Experiments on eight MLLMs show that grounding is the primary bottleneck: Gemini-3-pro achieves the best average overall score (0.573), while GPT-5 attains the highest SIN-QA answer accuracy (0.767) but underperforms on evidence-aligned overall scores, exposing a gap between correctness and traceable support.

Paywalls, licenses and copyright rules often restrict the broad dissemination and reuse of scientific knowledge. We take the position that it is both legally and technically feasible to extract the scientific knowledge in scholarly texts. Current methods, like text embeddings, fail to reliably preserve factual content, and simple paraphrasing may not be legally sound. We urge the community to adopt a new idea: convert scholarly documents into Knowledge Units using LLMs. These units use structured data capturing entities, attributes and relationships without stylistic content. We provide evidence that Knowledge Units: (1) form a legally defensible framework for sharing knowledge from copyrighted research texts, based on legal analyses of German copyright law and U.S. Fair Use doctrine, and (2) preserve most (~95%) factual knowledge from original text, measured by MCQ performance on facts from the original copyrighted text across four research domains. Freeing scientific knowledge from copyright promises transformative benefits for scientific research and education by allowing language models to reuse important facts from copyrighted text. To support this, we share open-source tools for converting research documents into Knowledge Units. Overall, our work posits the feasibility of democratizing access to scientific knowledge while respecting copyright.

Fact verification systems typically assess whether a claim is supported by retrieved evidence, assuming that truthfulness depends solely on what is stated. However, many real-world claims are half-truths, factually correct yet misleading due to the omission of critical context. Existing models struggle with such cases, as they are not designed to reason about what is left unsaid. We introduce the task of half-truth detection, and propose PolitiFact-Hidden, a new benchmark with 15k political claims annotated with sentence-level evidence alignment and inferred claim intent. To address this challenge, we present TRACER, a modular re-assessment framework that identifies omission-based misinformation by aligning evidence, inferring implied intent, and estimating the causal impact of hidden content. TRACER can be integrated into existing fact-checking pipelines and consistently improves performance across multiple strong baselines. Notably, it boosts Half-True classification F1 by up to 16 points, highlighting the importance of modeling omissions for trustworthy fact verification.

A significant and growing number of published scientific articles is found to involve fraudulent practices, posing a serious threat to the credibility and safety of research in fields such as medicine. We propose Pub-Guard-LLM, the first large language model-based system tailored to fraud detection of biomedical scientific articles. We provide three application modes for deploying Pub-Guard-LLM: vanilla reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation, and multi-agent debate. Each mode allows for textual explanations of predictions. To assess the performance of our system, we introduce an open-source benchmark, PubMed Retraction, comprising over 11K real-world biomedical articles, including metadata and retraction labels. We show that, across all modes, Pub-Guard-LLM consistently surpasses the performance of various baselines and provides more reliable explanations, namely explanations which are deemed more relevant and coherent than those generated by the baselines when evaluated by multiple assessment methods. By enhancing both detection performance and explainability in scientific fraud detection, Pub-Guard-LLM contributes to safeguarding research integrity with a novel, effective, open-source tool.

Neural models have achieved great success on machine reading comprehension (MRC), many of which typically consist of two components: an evidence extractor and an answer predictor. The former seeks the most relevant information from a reference text, while the latter is to locate or generate answers from the extracted evidence. Despite the importance of evidence labels for training the evidence extractor, they are not cheaply accessible, particularly in many non-extractive MRC tasks such as YES/NO question answering and multi-choice MRC. To address this problem, we present a Self-Training method (STM), which supervises the evidence extractor with auto-generated evidence labels in an iterative process. At each iteration, a base MRC model is trained with golden answers and noisy evidence labels. The trained model will predict pseudo evidence labels as extra supervision in the next iteration. We evaluate STM on seven datasets over three MRC tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the improvement on existing MRC models, and we also analyze how and why such a self-training method works in MRC. The source code can be obtained from https://github.com/SparkJiao/Self-Training-MRC

Identifying, classifying, and analyzing arguments in legal discourse has been a prominent area of research since the inception of the argument mining field. However, there has been a major discrepancy between the way natural language processing (NLP) researchers model and annotate arguments in court decisions and the way legal experts understand and analyze legal argumentation. While computational approaches typically simplify arguments into generic premises and claims, arguments in legal research usually exhibit a rich typology that is important for gaining insights into the particular case and applications of law in general. We address this problem and make several substantial contributions to move the field forward. First, we design a new annotation scheme for legal arguments in proceedings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that is deeply rooted in the theory and practice of legal argumentation research. Second, we compile and annotate a large corpus of 373 court decisions (2.3M tokens and 15k annotated argument spans). Finally, we train an argument mining model that outperforms state-of-the-art models in the legal NLP domain and provide a thorough expert-based evaluation. All datasets and source codes are available under open lincenses at https://github.com/trusthlt/mining-legal-arguments.

Metrics like FactScore and VeriScore that evaluate long-form factuality operate by decomposing an input response into atomic claims and then individually verifying each claim. While effective and interpretable, these methods incur numerous LLM calls and can take upwards of 100 seconds to evaluate a single response, limiting their practicality in large-scale evaluation and training scenarios. To address this, we propose VeriFastScore, which leverages synthetic data to fine-tune Llama3.1 8B for simultaneously extracting and verifying all verifiable claims within a given text based on evidence from Google Search. We show that this task cannot be solved via few-shot prompting with closed LLMs due to its complexity: the model receives ~4K tokens of evidence on average and needs to concurrently decompose claims, judge their verifiability, and verify them against noisy evidence. However, our fine-tuned VeriFastScore model demonstrates strong correlation with the original VeriScore pipeline at both the example level (r=0.80) and system level (r=0.94) while achieving an overall speedup of 6.6x (9.9x excluding evidence retrieval) over VeriScore. To facilitate future factuality research, we publicly release our VeriFastScore model and synthetic datasets.

A key component of fact verification is thevevidence retrieval, often from multiple documents. Recent approaches use dense representations and condition the retrieval of each document on the previously retrieved ones. The latter step is performed over all the documents in the collection, requiring storing their dense representations in an index, thus incurring a high memory footprint. An alternative paradigm is retrieve-and-rerank, where documents are retrieved using methods such as BM25, their sentences are reranked, and further documents are retrieved conditioned on these sentences, reducing the memory requirements. However, such approaches can be brittle as they rely on heuristics and assume hyperlinks between documents. We propose a novel retrieve-and-rerank method for multi-hop retrieval, that consists of a retriever that jointly scores documents in the knowledge source and sentences from previously retrieved documents using an autoregressive formulation and is guided by a proof system based on natural logic that dynamically terminates the retrieval process if the evidence is deemed sufficient. This method is competitive with current state-of-the-art methods on FEVER, HoVer and FEVEROUS-S, while using 5 to 10 times less memory than competing systems. Evaluation on an adversarial dataset indicates improved stability of our approach compared to commonly deployed threshold-based methods. Finally, the proof system helps humans predict model decisions correctly more often than using the evidence alone.

Scientific information extraction (SciIE) is critical for converting unstructured knowledge from scholarly articles into structured data (entities and relations). Several datasets have been proposed for training and validating SciIE models. However, due to the high complexity and cost of annotating scientific texts, those datasets restrict their annotations to specific parts of paper, such as abstracts, resulting in the loss of diverse entity mentions and relations in context. In this paper, we release a new entity and relation extraction dataset for entities related to datasets, methods, and tasks in scientific articles. Our dataset contains 106 manually annotated full-text scientific publications with over 24k entities and 12k relations. To capture the intricate use and interactions among entities in full texts, our dataset contains a fine-grained tag set for relations. Additionally, we provide an out-of-distribution test set to offer a more realistic evaluation. We conduct comprehensive experiments, including state-of-the-art supervised models and our proposed LLM-based baselines, and highlight the challenges presented by our dataset, encouraging the development of innovative models to further the field of SciIE.

Hypothetical induction is recognized as the main reasoning type when scientists make observations about the world and try to propose hypotheses to explain those observations. Past research on hypothetical induction is under a constrained setting: (1) the observation annotations in the dataset are carefully manually handpicked sentences (resulting in a close-domain setting); and (2) the ground truth hypotheses are mostly commonsense knowledge, making the task less challenging. In this work, we tackle these problems by proposing the first dataset for social science academic hypotheses discovery, with the final goal to create systems that automatically generate valid, novel, and helpful scientific hypotheses, given only a pile of raw web corpus. Unlike previous settings, the new dataset requires (1) using open-domain data (raw web corpus) as observations; and (2) proposing hypotheses even new to humanity. A multi-module framework is developed for the task, including three different feedback mechanisms to boost performance, which exhibits superior performance in terms of both GPT-4 based and expert-based evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work showing that LLMs are able to generate novel (''not existing in literature'') and valid (''reflecting reality'') scientific hypotheses.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world fact-checking systems, yet existing evaluations focus predominantly on claim verification and overlook the broader fact-checking workflow, including claim extraction and evidence retrieval. This narrow focus prevents current benchmarks from revealing systematic reasoning failures, factual blind spots, and robustness limitations of modern LLMs. To bridge this gap, we present FactArena, a fully automated arena-style evaluation framework that conducts comprehensive, stage-wise benchmarking of LLMs across the complete fact-checking pipeline. FactArena integrates three key components: (i) an LLM-driven fact-checking process that standardizes claim decomposition, evidence retrieval via tool-augmented interactions, and justification-based verdict prediction; (ii) an arena-styled judgment mechanism guided by consolidated reference guidelines to ensure unbiased and consistent pairwise comparisons across heterogeneous judge agents; and (iii) an arena-driven claim-evolution module that adaptively generates more challenging and semantically controlled claims to probe LLMs' factual robustness beyond fixed seed data. Across 16 state-of-the-art LLMs spanning seven model families, FactArena produces stable and interpretable rankings. Our analyses further reveal significant discrepancies between static claim-verification accuracy and end-to-end fact-checking competence, highlighting the necessity of holistic evaluation. The proposed framework offers a scalable and trustworthy paradigm for diagnosing LLMs' factual reasoning, guiding future model development, and advancing the reliable deployment of LLMs in safety-critical fact-checking applications.

Extracting key information from scientific papers has the potential to help researchers work more efficiently and accelerate the pace of scientific progress. Over the last few years, research on Scientific Information Extraction (SciIE) witnessed the release of several new systems and benchmarks. However, existing paper-focused datasets mostly focus only on specific parts of a manuscript (e.g., abstracts) and are single-modality (i.e., text- or table-only), due to complex processing and expensive annotations. Moreover, core information can be present in either text or tables or across both. To close this gap in data availability and enable cross-modality IE, while alleviating labeling costs, we propose a semi-supervised pipeline for annotating entities in text, as well as entities and relations in tables, in an iterative procedure. Based on this pipeline, we release novel resources for the scientific community, including a high-quality benchmark, a large-scale corpus, and a semi-supervised annotation pipeline. We further report the performance of state-of-the-art IE models on the proposed benchmark dataset, as a baseline. Lastly, we explore the potential capability of large language models such as ChatGPT for the current task. Our new dataset, results, and analysis validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our semi-supervised pipeline, and we discuss its remaining limitations.

To tackle the AVeriTeC shared task hosted by the FEVER-24, we introduce a system that only employs publicly available large language models (LLMs) for each step of automated fact-checking, dubbed the Herd of Open LLMs for verifying real-world claims (HerO). For evidence retrieval, a language model is used to enhance a query by generating hypothetical fact-checking documents. We prompt pretrained and fine-tuned LLMs for question generation and veracity prediction by crafting prompts with retrieved in-context samples. HerO achieved 2nd place on the leaderboard with the AVeriTeC score of 0.57, suggesting the potential of open LLMs for verifying real-world claims. For future research, we make our code publicly available at https://github.com/ssu-humane/HerO.

Fact-checking long-form text is challenging, and it is therefore common practice to break it down into multiple atomic claims. The typical approach to fact-checking these atomic claims involves retrieving a fixed number of pieces of evidence, followed by a verification step. However, this method is usually not cost-effective, as it underutilizes the verification model's internal knowledge of the claim and fails to replicate the iterative reasoning process in human search strategies. To address these limitations, we propose FIRE, a novel agent-based framework that integrates evidence retrieval and claim verification in an iterative manner. Specifically, FIRE employs a unified mechanism to decide whether to provide a final answer or generate a subsequent search query, based on its confidence in the current judgment. We compare FIRE with other strong fact-checking frameworks and find that it achieves slightly better performance while reducing large language model (LLM) costs by an average of 7.6 times and search costs by 16.5 times. These results indicate that FIRE holds promise for application in large-scale fact-checking operations. Our code is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/fire.git.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are accelerating scientific idea generation, but rigorously evaluating these numerous, often superficial, AI-generated propositions for novelty and factual accuracy is a critical bottleneck; manual verification is too slow. Existing validation methods are inadequate: LLMs as standalone verifiers may hallucinate and lack domain knowledge (our findings show 60% unawareness of relevant papers in specific domains), while traditional citation networks lack explicit causality and narrative surveys are unstructured. This underscores a core challenge: the absence of structured, verifiable, and causally-linked historical data of scientific evolution.To address this,we introduce THE-Tree (Technology History Evolution Tree), a computational framework that constructs such domain-specific evolution trees from scientific literature. THE-Tree employs a search algorithm to explore evolutionary paths. During its node expansion, it utilizes a novel "Think-Verbalize-Cite-Verify" process: an LLM proposes potential advancements and cites supporting literature. Critically, each proposed evolutionary link is then validated for logical coherence and evidential support by a recovered natural language inference mechanism that interrogates the cited literature, ensuring that each step is grounded. We construct and validate 88 THE-Trees across diverse domains and release a benchmark dataset including up to 71k fact verifications covering 27k papers to foster further research. Experiments demonstrate that i) in graph completion, our THE-Tree improves hit@1 by 8% to 14% across multiple models compared to traditional citation networks; ii) for predicting future scientific developments, it improves hit@1 metric by nearly 10%; and iii) when combined with other methods, it boosts the performance of evaluating important scientific papers by almost 100%.

Relation Extraction (RE) has been extended to cross-document scenarios because many relations are not simply described in a single document. This inevitably brings the challenge of efficient open-space evidence retrieval to support the inference of cross-document relations, along with the challenge of multi-hop reasoning on top of entities and evidence scattered in an open set of documents. To combat these challenges, we propose MR.COD (Multi-hop evidence retrieval for Cross-document relation extraction), which is a multi-hop evidence retrieval method based on evidence path mining and ranking. We explore multiple variants of retrievers to show evidence retrieval is essential in cross-document RE. We also propose a contextual dense retriever for this setting. Experiments on CodRED show that evidence retrieval with MR.COD effectively acquires crossdocument evidence and boosts end-to-end RE performance in both closed and open settings.

Humanities scholars commonly provide evidence for claims that they make about a work of literature (e.g., a novel) in the form of quotations from the work. We collect a large-scale dataset (RELiC) of 78K literary quotations and surrounding critical analysis and use it to formulate the novel task of literary evidence retrieval, in which models are given an excerpt of literary analysis surrounding a masked quotation and asked to retrieve the quoted passage from the set of all passages in the work. Solving this retrieval task requires a deep understanding of complex literary and linguistic phenomena, which proves challenging to methods that overwhelmingly rely on lexical and semantic similarity matching. We implement a RoBERTa-based dense passage retriever for this task that outperforms existing pretrained information retrieval baselines; however, experiments and analysis by human domain experts indicate that there is substantial room for improvement over our dense retriever.

Thousands of new scientific papers are published each month. Such information overload complicates researcher efforts to stay current with the state-of-the-art as well as to verify and correctly attribute claims. We pose the following research question: Given a text excerpt referencing a paper, could an LM act as a research assistant to correctly identify the referenced paper? We advance efforts to answer this question by building a benchmark that evaluates the abilities of LMs in citation attribution. Our benchmark, CiteME, consists of text excerpts from recent machine learning papers, each referencing a single other paper. CiteME use reveals a large gap between frontier LMs and human performance, with LMs achieving only 4.2-18.5% accuracy and humans 69.7%. We close this gap by introducing CiteAgent, an autonomous system built on the GPT-4o LM that can also search and read papers, which achieves an accuracy of 35.3\% on CiteME. Overall, CiteME serves as a challenging testbed for open-ended claim attribution, driving the research community towards a future where any claim made by an LM can be automatically verified and discarded if found to be incorrect.

With the recent advances of large language models (LLMs), it is no longer infeasible to build an automated debate system that helps people to synthesise persuasive arguments. Previous work attempted this task by integrating multiple components. In our work, we introduce an argument mining dataset that captures the end-to-end process of preparing an argumentative essay for a debate, which covers the tasks of claim and evidence identification (Task 1 ED), evidence convincingness ranking (Task 2 ECR), argumentative essay summarisation and human preference ranking (Task 3 ASR) and metric learning for automated evaluation of resulting essays, based on human feedback along argument quality dimensions (Task 4 SQE). Our dataset contains 14k examples of claims that are fully annotated with the various properties supporting the aforementioned tasks. We evaluate multiple generative baselines for each of these tasks, including representative LLMs. We find, that while they show promising results on individual tasks in our benchmark, their end-to-end performance on all four tasks in succession deteriorates significantly, both in automated measures as well as in human-centred evaluation. This challenge presented by our proposed dataset motivates future research on end-to-end argument mining and summarisation. The repository of this project is available at https://github.com/HarrywillDr/ArgSum-Datatset

In this paper we address the challenge of extracting scientific references from patents. We approach the problem as a sequence labelling task and investigate the merits of BERT models to the extraction of these long sequences. References in patents to scientific literature are relevant to study the connection between science and industry. Most prior work only uses the front-page citations for this analysis, which are provided in the metadata of patent archives. In this paper we build on prior work using Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and Flair for reference extraction. We improve the quality of the training data and train three BERT-based models on the labelled data (BERT, bioBERT, sciBERT). We find that the improved training data leads to a large improvement in the quality of the trained models. In addition, the BERT models beat CRF and Flair, with recall scores around 97% obtained with cross validation. With the best model we label a large collection of 33 thousand patents, extract the citations, and match them to publications in the Web of Science database. We extract 50% more references than with the old training data and methods: 735 thousand references in total. With these patent-publication links, follow-up research will further analyze which types of scientific work lead to inventions.

Patent claims define the scope of protection and establish the legal boundaries of an invention. Drafting these claims is a complex and time-consuming process that usually requires the expertise of skilled patent attorneys, which can form a large access barrier for many small enterprises. To solve these challenges, researchers have investigated the use of large language models (LLMs) for automating patent claim generation. However, existing studies highlight inconsistencies between automated evaluation metrics and human expert assessments. To bridge this gap, we introduce Patent-CE, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating patent claims. Patent-CE includes comparative claim evaluations annotated by patent experts, focusing on five key criteria: feature completeness, conceptual clarity, terminology consistency, logical linkage, and overall quality. Additionally, we propose PatClaimEval, a novel multi-dimensional evaluation method specifically designed for patent claims. Our experiments demonstrate that PatClaimEval achieves the highest correlation with human expert evaluations across all assessment criteria among all tested metrics. This research provides the groundwork for more accurate evaluations of automated patent claim generation systems.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate fluent and convincing responses, they are not necessarily correct. This is especially apparent in the popular decompose-then-verify factuality evaluation pipeline, where LLMs evaluate generations by decomposing the generations into individual, valid claims. Factuality evaluation is especially important for medical answers, since incorrect medical information could seriously harm the patient. However, existing factuality systems are a poor match for the medical domain, as they are typically only evaluated on objective, entity-centric, formulaic texts such as biographies and historical topics. This differs from condition-dependent, conversational, hypothetical, sentence-structure diverse, and subjective medical answers, which makes decomposition into valid facts challenging. We propose MedScore, a new pipeline to decompose medical answers into condition-aware valid facts and verify against in-domain corpora. Our method extracts up to three times more valid facts than existing methods, reducing hallucination and vague references, and retaining condition-dependency in facts. The resulting factuality score substantially varies by decomposition method, verification corpus, and used backbone LLM, highlighting the importance of customizing each step for reliable factuality evaluation by using our generalizable and modularized pipeline for domain adaptation.

One challenge in fact checking is the ability to improve the transparency of the decision. We present a fact checking method that uses reference information in knowledge graphs (KGs) to assess claims and explain its decisions. KGs contain a formal representation of knowledge with semantic descriptions of entities and their relationships. We exploit such rich semantics to produce interpretable explanations for the fact checking output. As information in a KG is inevitably incomplete, we rely on logical rule discovery and on Web text mining to gather the evidence to assess a given claim. Uncertain rules and facts are turned into logical programs and the checking task is modeled as an inference problem in a probabilistic extension of answer set programs. Experiments show that the probabilistic inference enables the efficient labeling of claims with interpretable explanations, and the quality of the results is higher than state of the art baselines.

Complex claim fact-checking performs a crucial role in disinformation detection. However, existing fact-checking methods struggle with claim vagueness, specifically in effectively handling latent information and complex relations within claims. Moreover, evidence redundancy, where nonessential information complicates the verification process, remains a significant issue. To tackle these limitations, we propose Bilateral Defusing Verification (BiDeV), a novel fact-checking working-flow framework integrating multiple role-played LLMs to mimic the human-expert fact-checking process. BiDeV consists of two main modules: Vagueness Defusing identifies latent information and resolves complex relations to simplify the claim, and Redundancy Defusing eliminates redundant content to enhance the evidence quality. Extensive experimental results on two widely used challenging fact-checking benchmarks (Hover and Feverous-s) demonstrate that our BiDeV can achieve the best performance under both gold and open settings. This highlights the effectiveness of BiDeV in handling complex claims and ensuring precise fact-checking

In this paper, we champion the use of structured and semantic content representation of discourse-based scholarly communication, inspired by tools like Wikipedia infoboxes or structured Amazon product descriptions. These representations provide users with a concise overview, aiding scientists in navigating the dense academic landscape. Our novel automated approach leverages the robust text generation capabilities of LLMs to produce structured scholarly contribution summaries, offering both a practical solution and insights into LLMs' emergent abilities. For LLMs, the prime focus is on improving their general intelligence as conversational agents. We argue that these models can also be applied effectively in information extraction (IE), specifically in complex IE tasks within terse domains like Science. This paradigm shift replaces the traditional modular, pipelined machine learning approach with a simpler objective expressed through instructions. Our results show that finetuned FLAN-T5 with 1000x fewer parameters than the state-of-the-art GPT-davinci is competitive for the task.

Misinformation and disinformation demand fact checking that goes beyond simple evidence-based reasoning. Existing benchmarks fall short: they are largely single modality (text-only), span short time horizons, use shallow evidence, cover domains unevenly, and often omit full articles -- obscuring models' real-world capability. We present MMM-Fact, a large-scale benchmark of 125,449 fact-checked statements (1995--2025) across multiple domains, each paired with the full fact-check article and multimodal evidence (text, images, videos, tables) from four fact-checking sites and one news outlet. To reflect verification effort, each statement is tagged with a retrieval-difficulty tier -- Basic (1--5 sources), Intermediate (6--10), and Advanced (>10) -- supporting fairness-aware evaluation for multi-step, cross-modal reasoning. The dataset adopts a three-class veracity scheme (true/false/not enough information) and enables tasks in veracity prediction, explainable fact-checking, complex evidence aggregation, and longitudinal analysis. Baselines with mainstream LLMs show MMM-Fact is markedly harder than prior resources, with performance degrading as evidence complexity rises. MMM-Fact offers a realistic, scalable benchmark for transparent, reliable, multimodal fact-checking.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate an impressive capacity to recall a vast range of factual knowledge. However, understanding their underlying reasoning and internal mechanisms in exploiting this knowledge remains a key research area. This work unveils the factual information an LLM represents internally for sentence-level claim verification. We propose an end-to-end framework to decode factual knowledge embedded in token representations from a vector space to a set of ground predicates, showing its layer-wise evolution using a dynamic knowledge graph. Our framework employs activation patching, a vector-level technique that alters a token representation during inference, to extract encoded knowledge. Accordingly, we neither rely on training nor external models. Using factual and common-sense claims from two claim verification datasets, we showcase interpretability analyses at local and global levels. The local analysis highlights entity centrality in LLM reasoning, from claim-related information and multi-hop reasoning to representation errors causing erroneous evaluation. On the other hand, the global reveals trends in the underlying evolution, such as word-based knowledge evolving into claim-related facts. By interpreting semantics from LLM latent representations and enabling graph-related analyses, this work enhances the understanding of the factual knowledge resolution process.

This paper describes the results of SemEval 2023 task 7 -- Multi-Evidence Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trial Data (NLI4CT) -- consisting of 2 tasks, a Natural Language Inference (NLI) task, and an evidence selection task on clinical trial data. The proposed challenges require multi-hop biomedical and numerical reasoning, which are of significant importance to the development of systems capable of large-scale interpretation and retrieval of medical evidence, to provide personalized evidence-based care. Task 1, the entailment task, received 643 submissions from 40 participants, and Task 2, the evidence selection task, received 364 submissions from 23 participants. The tasks are challenging, with the majority of submitted systems failing to significantly outperform the majority class baseline on the entailment task, and we observe significantly better performance on the evidence selection task than on the entailment task. Increasing the number of model parameters leads to a direct increase in performance, far more significant than the effect of biomedical pre-training. Future works could explore the limitations of large models for generalization and numerical inference, and investigate methods to augment clinical datasets to allow for more rigorous testing and to facilitate fine-tuning. We envisage that the dataset, models, and results of this task will be useful to the biomedical NLI and evidence retrieval communities. The dataset, competition leaderboard, and website are publicly available.

The proliferation of online misinformation has posed significant threats to public interest. While numerous online users actively participate in the combat against misinformation, many of such responses can be characterized by the lack of politeness and supporting facts. As a solution, text generation approaches are proposed to automatically produce counter-misinformation responses. Nevertheless, existing methods are often trained end-to-end without leveraging external knowledge, resulting in subpar text quality and excessively repetitive responses. In this paper, we propose retrieval augmented response generation for online misinformation (RARG), which collects supporting evidence from scientific sources and generates counter-misinformation responses based on the evidences. In particular, our RARG consists of two stages: (1) evidence collection, where we design a retrieval pipeline to retrieve and rerank evidence documents using a database comprising over 1M academic articles; (2) response generation, in which we align large language models (LLMs) to generate evidence-based responses via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). We propose a reward function to maximize the utilization of the retrieved evidence while maintaining the quality of the generated text, which yields polite and factual responses that clearly refutes misinformation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we study the case of COVID-19 and perform extensive experiments with both in- and cross-domain datasets, where RARG consistently outperforms baselines by generating high-quality counter-misinformation responses.

Modern generative search engines enhance the reliability of large language model (LLM) responses by providing cited evidence. However, evaluating the answer's attribution, i.e., whether every claim within the generated responses is fully supported by its cited evidence, remains an open problem. This verification, traditionally dependent on costly human evaluation, underscores the urgent need for automatic attribution evaluation methods. To bridge the gap in the absence of standardized benchmarks for these methods, we present AttributionBench, a comprehensive benchmark compiled from various existing attribution datasets. Our extensive experiments on AttributionBench reveal the challenges of automatic attribution evaluation, even for state-of-the-art LLMs. Specifically, our findings show that even a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 only achieves around 80% macro-F1 under a binary classification formulation. A detailed analysis of more than 300 error cases indicates that a majority of failures stem from the model's inability to process nuanced information, and the discrepancy between the information the model has access to and that human annotators do.

How do we most effectively treat a disease or condition? Ideally, we could consult a database of evidence gleaned from clinical trials to answer such questions. Unfortunately, no such database exists; clinical trial results are instead disseminated primarily via lengthy natural language articles. Perusing all such articles would be prohibitively time-consuming for healthcare practitioners; they instead tend to depend on manually compiled systematic reviews of medical literature to inform care. NLP may speed this process up, and eventually facilitate immediate consult of published evidence. The Evidence Inference dataset was recently released to facilitate research toward this end. This task entails inferring the comparative performance of two treatments, with respect to a given outcome, from a particular article (describing a clinical trial) and identifying supporting evidence. For instance: Does this article report that chemotherapy performed better than surgery for five-year survival rates of operable cancers? In this paper, we collect additional annotations to expand the Evidence Inference dataset by 25\%, provide stronger baseline models, systematically inspect the errors that these make, and probe dataset quality. We also release an abstract only (as opposed to full-texts) version of the task for rapid model prototyping. The updated corpus, documentation, and code for new baselines and evaluations are available at http://evidence-inference.ebm-nlp.com/.

In this work, we focus on the problem of retrieving relevant arguments for a query claim covering diverse aspects. State-of-the-art methods rely on explicit mappings between claims and premises, and thus are unable to utilize large available collections of premises without laborious and costly manual annotation. Their diversity approach relies on removing duplicates via clustering which does not directly ensure that the selected premises cover all aspects. This work introduces a new multi-step approach for the argument retrieval problem. Rather than relying on ground-truth assignments, our approach employs a machine learning model to capture semantic relationships between arguments. Beyond that, it aims to cover diverse facets of the query, instead of trying to identify duplicates explicitly. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach leads to a significant improvement in the argument retrieval task even though it requires less data.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in scientific disciplines such as biomedicine, particularly in hypothesis generation, where they can analyze vast literature, identify patterns, and suggest research directions. However, a key challenge lies in evaluating the truthfulness of generated hypotheses, as verifying their accuracy often requires substantial time and resources. Additionally, the hallucination problem in LLMs can lead to the generation of hypotheses that appear plausible but are ultimately incorrect, undermining their reliability. To facilitate the systematic study of these challenges, we introduce TruthHypo, a benchmark for assessing the capabilities of LLMs in generating truthful biomedical hypotheses, and KnowHD, a knowledge-based hallucination detector to evaluate how well hypotheses are grounded in existing knowledge. Our results show that LLMs struggle to generate truthful hypotheses. By analyzing hallucinations in reasoning steps, we demonstrate that the groundedness scores provided by KnowHD serve as an effective metric for filtering truthful hypotheses from the diverse outputs of LLMs. Human evaluations further validate the utility of KnowHD in identifying truthful hypotheses and accelerating scientific discovery. Our data and source code are available at https://github.com/Teddy-XiongGZ/TruthHypo.

Fact-checking requires retrieving evidence related to a claim under investigation. The task can be formulated as question generation based on a claim, followed by question answering. However, recent question generation approaches assume that the answer is known and typically contained in a passage given as input, whereas such passages are what is being sought when verifying a claim. In this paper, we present {\it Varifocal}, a method that generates questions based on different focal points within a given claim, i.e.\ different spans of the claim and its metadata, such as its source and date. Our method outperforms previous work on a fact-checking question generation dataset on a wide range of automatic evaluation metrics. These results are corroborated by our manual evaluation, which indicates that our method generates more relevant and informative questions. We further demonstrate the potential of focal points in generating sets of clarification questions for product descriptions.

With the exponential growth of research facilitated by modern technology and improved accessibility, scientific discoveries have become increasingly fragmented within and across fields. This makes it challenging to assess the significance, novelty, incremental findings, and equivalent ideas between related works, particularly those from different research communities. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong quantitative and qualitative reasoning abilities, and multi-agent LLM debates have shown promise in handling complex reasoning tasks by exploring diverse perspectives and reasoning paths. Inspired by this, we introduce Tree-of-Debate (ToD), a framework which converts scientific papers into LLM personas that debate their respective novelties. To emphasize structured, critical reasoning rather than focusing solely on outcomes, ToD dynamically constructs a debate tree, enabling fine-grained analysis of independent novelty arguments within scholarly articles. Through experiments on scientific literature across various domains, evaluated by expert researchers, we demonstrate that ToD generates informative arguments, effectively contrasts papers, and supports researchers in their literature review.

Developing the required technology to assist medical experts in their everyday activities is currently a hot topic in the Artificial Intelligence research field. Thus, a number of large language models (LLMs) and automated benchmarks have recently been proposed with the aim of facilitating information extraction in Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) using natural language as a tool for mediating in human-AI interaction. The most representative benchmarks are limited to either multiple-choice or long-form answers and are available only in English. In order to address these shortcomings, in this paper we present a new dataset which, unlike previous work: (i) includes not only explanatory arguments for the correct answer, but also arguments to reason why the incorrect answers are not correct; (ii) the explanations are written originally by medical doctors to answer questions from the Spanish Residency Medical Exams. Furthermore, this new benchmark allows us to setup a novel extractive task which consists of identifying the explanation of the correct answer written by medical doctors. An additional benefit of our setting is that we can leverage the extractive QA paradigm to automatically evaluate performance of LLMs without resorting to costly manual evaluation by medical experts. Comprehensive experimentation with language models for Spanish shows that sometimes multilingual models fare better than monolingual ones, even outperforming models which have been adapted to the medical domain. Furthermore, results across the monolingual models are mixed, with supposedly smaller and inferior models performing competitively. In any case, the obtained results show that our novel dataset and approach can be an effective technique to help medical practitioners in identifying relevant evidence-based explanations for medical questions.

Despite the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in medicine, they may generate responses lacking supporting evidence or based on hallucinated evidence. While Retrieval Augment Generation (RAG) is popular to address this issue, few studies implemented and evaluated RAG in downstream domain-specific applications. We developed a RAG pipeline with 70,000 ophthalmology-specific documents that retrieve relevant documents to augment LLMs during inference time. In a case study on long-form consumer health questions, we systematically evaluated the responses including over 500 references of LLMs with and without RAG on 100 questions with 10 healthcare professionals. The evaluation focuses on factuality of evidence, selection and ranking of evidence, attribution of evidence, and answer accuracy and completeness. LLMs without RAG provided 252 references in total. Of which, 45.3% hallucinated, 34.1% consisted of minor errors, and 20.6% were correct. In contrast, LLMs with RAG significantly improved accuracy (54.5% being correct) and reduced error rates (18.8% with minor hallucinations and 26.7% with errors). 62.5% of the top 10 documents retrieved by RAG were selected as the top references in the LLM response, with an average ranking of 4.9. The use of RAG also improved evidence attribution (increasing from 1.85 to 2.49 on a 5-point scale, P<0.001), albeit with slight decreases in accuracy (from 3.52 to 3.23, P=0.03) and completeness (from 3.47 to 3.27, P=0.17). The results demonstrate that LLMs frequently exhibited hallucinated and erroneous evidence in the responses, raising concerns for downstream applications in the medical domain. RAG substantially reduced the proportion of such evidence but encountered challenges.

The problem of verifying whether a textual hypothesis holds based on the given evidence, also known as fact verification, plays an important role in the study of natural language understanding and semantic representation. However, existing studies are mainly restricted to dealing with unstructured evidence (e.g., natural language sentences and documents, news, etc), while verification under structured evidence, such as tables, graphs, and databases, remains under-explored. This paper specifically aims to study the fact verification given semi-structured data as evidence. To this end, we construct a large-scale dataset called TabFact with 16k Wikipedia tables as the evidence for 118k human-annotated natural language statements, which are labeled as either ENTAILED or REFUTED. TabFact is challenging since it involves both soft linguistic reasoning and hard symbolic reasoning. To address these reasoning challenges, we design two different models: Table-BERT and Latent Program Algorithm (LPA). Table-BERT leverages the state-of-the-art pre-trained language model to encode the linearized tables and statements into continuous vectors for verification. LPA parses statements into programs and executes them against the tables to obtain the returned binary value for verification. Both methods achieve similar accuracy but still lag far behind human performance. We also perform a comprehensive analysis to demonstrate great future opportunities. The data and code of the dataset are provided in https://github.com/wenhuchen/Table-Fact-Checking.

Identifying claims requiring verification is a critical task in automated fact-checking, especially given the proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms. Despite notable progress, challenges remain-particularly in handling multilingual data prevalent in online discourse. Recent efforts have focused on fine-tuning pre-trained multilingual language models to address this. While these models can handle multiple languages, their ability to effectively transfer cross-lingual knowledge for detecting claims spreading on social media remains under-explored. In this paper, we introduce EX-Claim, an entity-aware cross-lingual claim detection model that generalizes well to handle multilingual claims. The model leverages entity information derived from named entity recognition and entity linking techniques to improve the language-level performance of both seen and unseen languages during training. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets from different social media platforms demonstrate that our proposed model stands out as an effective solution, demonstrating consistent performance gains across 27 languages and robust knowledge transfer between languages seen and unseen during training.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves large language models (LMs) by incorporating non-parametric knowledge through evidence retrieved from external sources. However, it often struggles to cope with inconsistent and irrelevant information that can distract the LM from its tasks, especially when multiple evidence pieces are required. While compressing the retrieved evidence with a compression model aims to address this issue, the compressed evidence may still be unfamiliar to the target model used for downstream tasks, potentially failing to utilize the evidence effectively. We propose FaviComp (Familarity-Aware Evidence Compression), a novel training-free evidence compression technique that makes retrieved evidence more familiar to the target model, while seamlessly integrating parametric knowledge from the model. Experimental results show that FaviComp consistently outperforms most recent evidence compression baselines across multiple open-domain QA datasets, improving accuracy by up to 28.1% while achieving high compression rates. Additionally, we demonstrate the effective integration of both parametric and non-parametric knowledge during evidence compression.

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate non-factual content, known as hallucinations. Existing retrieval-augmented-based hallucination detection approaches typically address this by framing it as a classification task, evaluating hallucinations based on their consistency with retrieved evidence. However, this approach usually lacks detailed explanations for these evaluations and does not assess the reliability of these explanations. Furthermore, deficiencies in retrieval systems can lead to irrelevant or partially relevant evidence retrieval, impairing the detection process. Moreover, while real-world hallucination detection requires analyzing multiple pieces of evidence, current systems usually treat all evidence uniformly without considering its relevance to the content. To address these challenges, we introduce Halu-J, a critique-based hallucination judge with 7 billion parameters. Halu-J enhances hallucination detection by selecting pertinent evidence and providing detailed critiques. Our experiments indicate that Halu-J outperforms GPT-4o in multiple-evidence hallucination detection and matches its capability in critique generation and evidence selection. We also introduce ME-FEVER, a new dataset designed for multiple-evidence hallucination detection. Our code and dataset can be found in https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/factool .

Current large language models (LLMs) often suffer from hallucination issues, i,e, generating content that appears factual but is actually unreliable. A typical hallucination detection pipeline involves response decomposition (i.e., claim extraction), query generation, evidence collection (i.e., search or retrieval), and claim verification. However, existing methods exhibit limitations in the first two stages, such as context loss during claim extraction and low specificity in query generation, resulting in degraded performance across the hallucination detection pipeline. In this work, we introduce JointCQ https://github.com/pku0xff/JointCQ, a joint claim-and-query generation framework designed to construct an effective and efficient claim-query generator. Our framework leverages elaborately designed evaluation criteria to filter synthesized training data, and finetunes a language model for joint claim extraction and query generation, providing reliable and informative inputs for downstream search and verification. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods on multiple open-domain QA hallucination detection benchmarks, advancing the goal of more trustworthy and transparent language model systems.