# Generating Fact Checking Briefs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.05448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05448/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [Self-critiquing models for assisting human evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05802/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11896/) (2021)
- [Recursively Summarizing Books with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10862/) (2021)
- [RARR: Researching and Revising What Language Models Say, Using Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08726/) (2022)
- [Get Your Vitamin C! Robust Fact Verification with Contrastive Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08541/) (2021)
- [Internet-Augmented Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07566/) (2021)
- [Automated Fact-Checking for Assisting Human Fact-Checkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07769/) (2021)
- [AVeriTeC: A Dataset for Real-world Claim Verification with Evidence from the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13117/) (2023)
- [Internet-augmented language models through few-shot prompting for open-domain question answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05115/) (2022)
- [Complex Claim Verification with Evidence Retrieved in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11859/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Multimodal Fact-Checking and Explanation Generation: A Challenging Dataset and Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12487/) (2022)
- [Towards LLM-based Fact Verification on News Claims with a Hierarchical Step-by-Step Prompting Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00305/) (2023)
- [LongEval: Guidelines for Human Evaluation of Faithfulness in Long-form Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13298/) (2023)
- [Factcheck-Bench: Fine-Grained Evaluation Benchmark for Automatic Fact-checkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09000/) (2023)
- [Generating Literal and Implied Subquestions to Fact-check Complex Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06938/) (2022)
- [ProoFVer: Natural Logic Theorem Proving for Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11357/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Help Humans Verify Truthfulness -- Except When They Are Convincingly Wrong](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12558/) (2023)
- [Decomposition Dilemmas: Does Claim Decomposition Boost or Burden Fact-Checking Performance?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02400/) (2024)
- [Varifocal Question Generation for Fact-checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12400/) (2022)
- [Fin-Fact: A Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal Financial Fact Checking and Explanation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08793/) (2023)
- [The Intended Uses of Automated Fact-Checking Artefacts: Why, How and Who](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14238/) (2023)
- [Towards Effective Extraction and Evaluation of Factual Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10855/) (2025)
- [Can LLMs Improve Multimodal Fact-Checking by Asking Relevant Questions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04616/) (2024)
- [Explainable Fact-checking through Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05369/) (2021)
- [Crowdsourced Fact-Checking at Twitter: How Does the Crowd Compare With Experts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09214/) (2022)
- [Reinforcement Retrieval Leveraging Fine-grained Feedback for Fact Checking News Claims with Black-Box LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17283/) (2024)
- [TELLER: A Trustworthy Framework for Explainable, Generalizable and Controllable Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07776/) (2024)
- [Human-centered NLP Fact-checking: Co-Designing with Fact-checkers using Matchmaking for AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07213/) (2023)
- [A Reality Check on Context Utilisation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17031/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fact checking at scale is difficult -- while the number of active fact checking websites is growing, it remains too small for the needs of the contemporary media ecosystem. However, despite good intentions, contributions from volunteers are often error-prone, and thus in practice restricted to claim detection. We investigate how to increase the accuracy and efficiency of fact checking by providing information about the claim before performing the check, in the form of natural language briefs. We investigate passage-based briefs, containing a relevant passage from Wikipedia, entity-centric ones consisting of Wikipedia pages of mentioned entities, and Question-Answering Briefs, with questions decomposing the claim, and their answers. To produce QABriefs, we develop QABriefer, a model that generates a set of questions conditioned on the claim, searches the web for evidence, and generates answers. To train its components, we introduce QABriefDataset which we collected via crowdsourcing. We show that fact checking with briefs -- in particular QABriefs -- increases the accuracy of crowdworkers by 10% while slightly decreasing the time taken. For volunteer (unpaid) fact checkers, QABriefs slightly increase accuracy and reduce the time required by around 20%.