# Missing Counter-Evidence Renders NLP Fact-Checking Unrealistic for Misinformation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13865 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13865/

## Key facts

- Cited by 45 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14974/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11896/) (2021)
- ["Liar, Liar Pants on Fire": A New Benchmark Dataset for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00648/) (2017)
- [BadNL: Backdoor Attacks against NLP Models with Semantic-preserving Improvements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01043/) (2020)
- [Explainable Automated Fact-Checking for Public Health Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09926/) (2020)
- [HoVer: A Dataset for Many-Hop Fact Extraction And Claim Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03088/) (2020)
- [CLIMATE-FEVER: A Dataset for Verification of Real-World Climate Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00614/) (2020)
- [MultiFC: A Real-World Multi-Domain Dataset for Evidence-Based Fact Checking of Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03242/) (2019)
- [FEVEROUS: Fact Extraction and VERification Over Unstructured and Structured information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05707/) (2021)
- [Automated Fact-Checking for Assisting Human Fact-Checkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07769/) (2021)
- [Towards Debiasing Fact Verification Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05267/) (2019)
- [Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02517/) (2019)
- [Detection and Resolution of Rumours in Social Media: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00656/) (2017)
- [COVID-Fact: Fact Extraction and Verification of Real-World Claims on COVID-19 Pandemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03794/) (2021)
- [Automated Fact Checking: Task formulations, methods and future directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07687/) (2018)
- [X-FACT: A New Benchmark Dataset for Multilingual Fact Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09248/) (2021)
- [CoAID: COVID-19 Healthcare Misinformation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00885/) (2020)
- [Fighting an Infodemic: COVID-19 Fake News Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03327/) (2020)
- [Explainable Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03870/) (2020)
- [That is a Known Lie: Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06058/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Stance Detection for Mis- and Disinformation Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00242/) (2021)
- [A Richly Annotated Corpus for Different Tasks in Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01214/) (2019)
- [Open-Domain, Content-based, Multi-modal Fact-checking of Out-of-Context Images via Online Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00061/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Computational Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08024/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Natural Language Processing for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00770/) (2018)
- [DialFact: A Benchmark for Fact-Checking in Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08222/) (2021)
- [The Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task: Identification and Reconstruction of Implicit Warrants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01425/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Fact-Checking Complex Claims with Program-Guided Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12744/) (2023)
- [AVeriTeC: A Dataset for Real-world Claim Verification with Evidence from the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13117/) (2023)
- [Complex Claim Verification with Evidence Retrieved in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11859/) (2023)
- [Scientific Fact-Checking: A Survey of Resources and Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16859/) (2023)
- [WikiContradict: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Real-World Knowledge Conflicts from Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13805/) (2024)
- [The Automated Verification of Textual Claims (AVeriTeC) Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23850/) (2024)
- [Synthetic Misinformers: Generating and Combating Multimodal Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01217/) (2023)
- [The Intended Uses of Automated Fact-Checking Artefacts: Why, How and Who](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14238/) (2023)
- [RED-DOT: Multimodal Fact-checking via Relevant Evidence Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09939/) (2023)
- [AVerImaTeC: A Dataset for Automatic Verification of Image-Text Claims with Evidence from the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17978/) (2025)
- [Reinforcement Retrieval Leveraging Fine-grained Feedback for Fact Checking News Claims with Black-Box LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17283/) (2024)
- [Human-in-the-loop Evaluation for Early Misinformation Detection: A Case Study of COVID-19 Treatments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09683/) (2022)
- [Missci: Reconstructing Fallacies in Misrepresented Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03181/) (2024)
- [Similarity over Factuality: Are we making progress on multimodal out-of-context misinformation detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13488/) (2024)
- [Comparing Knowledge Sources for Open-Domain Scientific Claim Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02844/) (2024)
- [Claim Check-Worthiness Detection: How Well do LLMs Grasp Annotation Guidelines?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12174/) (2024)
- [CHECKWHY: Causal Fact Verification via Argument Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10918/) (2024)
- [A Reality Check on Context Utilisation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17031/) (2024)
- [Credible, Unreliable or Leaked?: Evidence Verification for Enhanced Automated Fact-checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18971/) (2024)
- [From Hypothesis to Publication: A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Driven Research Support Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01424/) (2025)
- [Debunk and Infer: Multimodal Fake News Detection via Diffusion-Generated Evidence and LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21557/) (2025)
- [M4FC: a Multimodal, Multilingual, Multicultural, Multitask Real-World Fact-Checking Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23508/) (2025)
- [WSDMS: Debunk Fake News via Weakly Supervised Detection of Misinforming Sentences with Contextualized Social Wisdom](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16579/) (2023)
- [VeriTaS: The First Dynamic Benchmark for Multimodal Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08611/) (2026)
- ["Image, Tell me your story!" Predicting the original meta-context of visual misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09939/) (2024)
- [HintsOfTruth: A Multimodal Checkworthiness Detection Dataset with Real and Synthetic Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11753/) (2025)
- [When Claims Evolve: Evaluating and Enhancing the Robustness of Embedding Models Against Misinformation Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03417/) (2025)
- [The CLEF-2026 CheckThat! Lab: Advancing Multilingual Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09516/) (2026)
- [Prompt, Condition, and Generate: Classification of Unsupported Claims with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10359/) (2023)
- [FACTS&EVIDENCE: An Interactive Tool for Transparent Fine-Grained Factual Verification of Machine-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14797/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Misinformation emerges in times of uncertainty when credible information is limited. This is challenging for NLP-based fact-checking as it relies on counter-evidence, which may not yet be available. Despite increasing interest in automatic fact-checking, it is still unclear if automated approaches can realistically refute harmful real-world misinformation. Here, we contrast and compare NLP fact-checking with how professional fact-checkers combat misinformation in the absence of counter-evidence. In our analysis, we show that, by design, existing NLP task definitions for fact-checking cannot refute misinformation as professional fact-checkers do for the majority of claims. We then define two requirements that the evidence in datasets must fulfill for realistic fact-checking: It must be (1) sufficient to refute the claim and (2) not leaked from existing fact-checking articles. We survey existing fact-checking datasets and find that all of them fail to satisfy both criteria. Finally, we perform experiments to demonstrate that models trained on a large-scale fact-checking dataset rely on leaked evidence, which makes them unsuitable in real-world scenarios. Taken together, we show that current NLP fact-checking cannot realistically combat real-world misinformation because it depends on unrealistic assumptions about counter-evidence in the data.