# Breaking Language Barriers with MMTweets: Advancing Cross-Lingual Debunked Narrative Retrieval for Fact-Checking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05680 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05680/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [Passage Re-ranking with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04085/) (2019)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11896/) (2021)
- [Multilingual Universal Sentence Encoder for Semantic Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04307/) (2019)
- [That is a Known Lie: Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06058/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Listwise Document Reranking with a Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02156/) (2023)
- [MuMiN: A Large-Scale Multilingual Multimodal Fact-Checked Misinformation Social Network Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11684/) (2022)
- [Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11427/) (2021)
- [Where Are the Facts? Searching for Fact-checked Information to Alleviate the Spread of Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03159/) (2020)
- [Claim Matching Beyond English to Scale Global Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00853/) (2021)
- [MM-COVID: A Multilingual and Multimodal Data Repository for Combating COVID-19 Disinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04088/) (2020)
- [Assisting the Human Fact-Checkers: Detecting All Previously Fact-Checked Claims in a Document](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07410/) (2021)
- [The Role of Context in Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07423/) (2021)
- [Article Reranking by Memory-Enhanced Key Sentence Matching for Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10322/) (2021)
- [Matching Tweets With Applicable Fact-Checks Across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07094/) (2022)
- [C3: Continued Pretraining with Contrastive Weak Supervision for Cross Language Ad-Hoc Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11989/) (2022)
- [VaxxHesitancy: A Dataset for Studying Hesitancy towards COVID-19 Vaccination on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06660/) (2023)
- [CrowdChecked: Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04447/) (2022)
- [Characterizing Multi-Domain False News and Underlying User Effects on Chinese Weibo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03068/) (2022)
- [Retrieving false claims on Twitter during the Russia-Ukraine conflict](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10121/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Claim Detection for Automated Fact-checking: A Survey on Monolingual, Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11969/) (2024)
- [Retrieving Climate Change Disinformation by Narrative](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22015/) (2026)
- [Multilingual vs Crosslingual Retrieval of Fact-Checked Claims: A Tale of Two Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22118/) (2025)
- [AKCIT-FN at CheckThat! 2025: Switching Fine-Tuned SLMs and LLM Prompting for Multilingual Claim Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11496/) (2025)
- [CommunityFact: A Dynamic, Multilingual, Multi-domain Benchmark for Misinformation Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30241/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Finding previously debunked narratives involves identifying claims that have already undergone fact-checking. The issue intensifies when similar false claims persist in multiple languages, despite the availability of debunks for several months in another language. Hence, automatically finding debunks (or fact-checks) in multiple languages is crucial to make the best use of scarce fact-checkers' resources. Mainly due to the lack of readily available data, this is an understudied problem, particularly when considering the cross-lingual scenario, i.e. the retrieval of debunks in a language different from the language of the online post being checked. This study introduces cross-lingual debunked narrative retrieval and addresses this research gap by: (i) creating Multilingual Misinformation Tweets (MMTweets): a dataset that stands out, featuring cross-lingual pairs, images, human annotations, and fine-grained labels, making it a comprehensive resource compared to its counterparts; (ii) conducting an extensive experiment to benchmark state-of-the-art cross-lingual retrieval models and introducing multistage retrieval methods tailored for the task; and (iii) comprehensively evaluating retrieval models for their cross-lingual and cross-dataset transfer capabilities within MMTweets, and conducting a retrieval latency analysis. We find that MMTweets presents challenges for cross-lingual debunked narrative retrieval, highlighting areas for improvement in retrieval models. Nonetheless, the study provides valuable insights for creating MMTweets datasets and optimising debunked narrative retrieval models to empower fact-checking endeavours. The dataset and annotation codebook are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10637161.