# Benchmarking the Generation of Fact Checking Explanations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.15202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15202/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04235/) (2018)
- [Defending Against Neural Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12616/) (2019)
- [Text Summarization with Pretrained Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08345/) (2019)
- [Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14974/) (2020)
- [Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09203/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Explainable Automated Fact-Checking for Public Health Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09926/) (2020)
- [MultiFC: A Real-World Multi-Domain Dataset for Evidence-Based Fact Checking of Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03242/) (2019)
- [Generating Fact Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05773/) (2020)
- [Locally Typical Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00666/) (2022)
- [GCAN: Graph-aware Co-Attention Networks for Explainable Fake News Detection on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11648/) (2020)
- [DeClarE: Debunking Fake News and False Claims using Evidence-Aware Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06416/) (2018)
- [COVID-Fact: Fact Extraction and Verification of Real-World Claims on COVID-19 Pandemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03794/) (2021)
- [Explainable Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03870/) (2020)
- [A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05638/) (2017)
- [Pre-trained Summarization Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13002/) (2020)
- [Reinforcement Learning-based Counter-Misinformation Response Generation: A Case Study of COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06433/) (2023)
- [Multi-Hop Fact Checking of Political Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06401/) (2020)
- [XFake: Explainable Fake News Detector with Visualizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07757/) (2019)
- [The Role of the Crowd in Countering Misinformation: A Case Study of the COVID-19 Infodemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05773/) (2020)
- [Explainable Fact Checking with Probabilistic Answer Set Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09198/) (2019)
- [Consumers and Curators: Browsing and Voting Patterns on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05267/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Can LLMs Produce Faithful Explanations For Fact-checking? Towards Faithful Explainable Fact-Checking via Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07401/) (2024)
- [JustiLM: Few-shot Justification Generation for Explainable Fact-Checking of Real-world Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08026/) (2024)
- [NLP for Counterspeech against Hate: A Survey and How-To Guide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20103/) (2024)
- [Generative Large Language Models in Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02351/) (2024)
- [FinDVer: Explainable Claim Verification over Long and Hybrid-Content Financial Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05764/) (2024)
- [Automated Justification Production for Claim Veracity in Fact Checking: A Survey on Architectures and Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12853/) (2024)
- [SemEval-2025 Task 7: Multilingual and Crosslingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10740/) (2025)
- [Countering Misinformation via Emotional Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10587/) (2023)
- [PropXplain: Can LLMs Enable Explainable Propaganda Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16550/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Evidence Attribution in Generated Fact Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12645/) (2024)
- [Face the Facts! Evaluating RAG-based Pipelines for Professional Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15189/) (2024)
- [Towards Automated Fact-Checking of Real-World Claims: Exploring Task Formulation and Assessment with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08909/) (2025)
- [COMMUNITYNOTES: A Dataset for Exploring the Helpfulness of Fact-Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24810/) (2025)
- [Take It Easy: Label-Adaptive Self-Rationalization for Fact Verification and Explanation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04002/) (2024)
- [Recon, Answer, Verify: Agents in Search of Truth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03671/) (2025)
- [From Fragments to Facts: A Curriculum-Driven DPO Approach for Generating Hindi News Veracity Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05179/) (2025)
- [TSVer: A Benchmark for Fact Verification Against Time-Series Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01101/) (2025)
- [Generating Zero-shot Abstractive Explanations for Rumour Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12713/) (2024)
- [Generative Debunking of Climate Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05599/) (2024)
- [When Hate Meets Facts: LLMs-in-the-Loop for Check-worthiness Detection in Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25269/) (2026)
- [Assisted Counterspeech Writing at the Crossroads of Hate Speech and Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22435/) (2026)
- [MEVER: Multi-Modal and Explainable Claim Verification with Graph-based Evidence Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10023/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Debunking Effectiveness through LLM-based Personality Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09533/) (2026)
- [CATCH-ME if you RAG: a dataset of Contextually Annotated multi-Turn Counterspeech against Hate and Misinformation Exchanges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20369/) (2026)
- [ProBel: Propaganda Detection with Techniques, Spans, and Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22388/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fighting misinformation is a challenging, yet crucial, task. Despite the growing number of experts being involved in manual fact-checking, this activity is time-consuming and cannot keep up with the ever-increasing amount of Fake News produced daily. Hence, automating this process is necessary to help curb misinformation. Thus far, researchers have mainly focused on claim veracity classification. In this paper, instead, we address the generation of justifications (textual explanation of why a claim is classified as either true or false) and benchmark it with novel datasets and advanced baselines. In particular, we focus on summarization approaches over unstructured knowledge (i.e. news articles) and we experiment with several extractive and abstractive strategies. We employed two datasets with different styles and structures, in order to assess the generalizability of our findings. Results show that in justification production summarization benefits from the claim information, and, in particular, that a claim-driven extractive step improves abstractive summarization performances. Finally, we show that although cross-dataset experiments suffer from performance degradation, a unique model trained on a combination of the two datasets is able to retain style information in an efficient manner.