# Claim Matching Beyond English to Scale Global Fact-Checking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.00853 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00853/

## Key facts

- Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10464/) (2018)
- [Multilingual and Multi-Aspect Hate Speech Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11049/) (2019)
- [That is a Known Lie: Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06058/) (2020)
- [Improving Multilingual Sentence Embedding using Bi-directional Dual Encoder with Additive Margin Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08564/) (2019)
- [Towards Automated Factchecking: Developing an Annotation Schema and Benchmark for Consistent Automated Claim Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08193/) (2018)
- [Where Are the Facts? Searching for Fact-checked Information to Alleviate the Spread of Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03159/) (2020)
- [CheckThat! at CLEF 2020: Enabling the Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08546/) (2020)
- [Images and Misinformation in Political Groups: Evidence from WhatsApp in India](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09784/) (2020)
- [Text Similarity Using Word Embeddings to Classify Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06634/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [A Survey on Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11896/) (2021)
- [AVeriTeC: A Dataset for Real-world Claim Verification with Evidence from the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13117/) (2023)
- [Claim Detection for Automated Fact-checking: A Survey on Monolingual, Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11969/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Previously Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07991/) (2023)
- [PROXYQA: An Alternative Framework for Evaluating Long-Form Text Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15042/) (2024)
- [Factify 2: A Multimodal Fake News and Satire News Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03897/) (2023)
- [Assisting the Human Fact-Checkers: Detecting All Previously Fact-Checked Claims in a Document](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07410/) (2021)
- [Matching Tweets With Applicable Fact-Checks Across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07094/) (2022)
- [CONCRETE: Improving Cross-lingual Fact-checking with Cross-lingual Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02071/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning with Instruction-following LLMs for Claim Matching in Automated Fact-checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10860/) (2025)
- [Dataset of Fake News Detection and Fact Verification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03299/) (2021)
- [SemEval-2025 Task 7: Multilingual and Crosslingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10740/) (2025)
- [Human-centered NLP Fact-checking: Co-Designing with Fact-checkers using Matchmaking for AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07213/) (2023)
- [Autonomation, Not Automation: Activities and Needs of European Fact-checkers as a Basis for Designing Human-Centered AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12143/) (2022)
- [Has It All Been Solved? Open NLP Research Questions Not Solved by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12544/) (2023)
- [MultiClaimNet: A Massively Multilingual Dataset of Fact-Checked Claim Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22280/) (2025)
- [CsFEVER and CTKFacts: Acquiring Czech data for fact verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11115/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models for Multilingual Previously Fact-Checked Claim Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02737/) (2025)
- [Breaking Language Barriers with MMTweets: Advancing Cross-Lingual Debunked Narrative Retrieval for Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05680/) (2023)
- [Cross-Lingual Learning vs. Low-Resource Fine-Tuning: A Case Study with Fact-Checking in Turkish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00411/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Automatic Credibility Assessment Using Textual Credibility Signals in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21360/) (2024)
- [When Claims Evolve: Evaluating and Enhancing the Robustness of Embedding Models Against Misinformation Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03417/) (2025)
- [Entity-aware Cross-lingual Claim Detection for Automated Fact-checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15220/) (2025)
- [ViClaim: A Multilingual Multilabel Dataset for Automatic Claim Detection in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12882/) (2025)
- [Tiplines to Combat Misinformation on Encrypted Platforms: A Case Study of the 2019 Indian Election on WhatsApp](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04726/) (2021)
- [Query Rewriting for Effective Misinformation Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07467/) (2022)
- [SynDy: Synthetic Dynamic Dataset Generation Framework for Misinformation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10700/) (2024)
- [Low-Shot Learning for Fictional Claim Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02769/) (2023)
- [Lost in translation: using global fact-checks to measure multilingual misinformation prevalence, spread, and evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18089/) (2023)
- [Synergizing Machine Learning & Symbolic Methods: A Survey on Hybrid Approaches to Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11972/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Manual fact-checking does not scale well to serve the needs of the internet. This issue is further compounded in non-English contexts. In this paper, we discuss claim matching as a possible solution to scale fact-checking. We define claim matching as the task of identifying pairs of textual messages containing claims that can be served with one fact-check. We construct a novel dataset of WhatsApp tipline and public group messages alongside fact-checked claims that are first annotated for containing "claim-like statements" and then matched with potentially similar items and annotated for claim matching. Our dataset contains content in high-resource (English, Hindi) and lower-resource (Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil) languages. We train our own embedding model using knowledge distillation and a high-quality "teacher" model in order to address the imbalance in embedding quality between the low- and high-resource languages in our dataset. We provide evaluations on the performance of our solution and compare with baselines and existing state-of-the-art multilingual embedding models, namely LASER and LaBSE. We demonstrate that our performance exceeds LASER and LaBSE in all settings. We release our annotated datasets, codebooks, and trained embedding model to allow for further research.