# Take It Easy: Label-Adaptive Self-Rationalization for Fact Verification and Explanation Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04002 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04002/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- ["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)
- [Generative Judge for Evaluating Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05470/) (2023)
- [AVeriTeC: A Dataset for Real-world Claim Verification with Evidence from the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13117/) (2023)
- [Generating Fact Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05773/) (2020)
- [Towards LLM-based Fact Verification on News Claims with a Hierarchical Step-by-Step Prompting Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00305/) (2023)
- [Few-Shot Self-Rationalization with Natural Language Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08284/) (2021)
- [TIGERScore: Towards Building Explainable Metric for All Text Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00752/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking the Generation of Fact Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15202/) (2023)
- [Few-Shot Out-of-Domain Transfer Learning of Natural Language Explanations in a Label-Abundant Setup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06204/) (2021)
- [Tell Me Why: Explainable Public Health Fact-Checking with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09454/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [DEFAME: Dynamic Evidence-based FAct-checking with Multimodal Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10510/) (2024)
- [Debating Truth: Debate-driven Claim Verification with Multiple Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19090/) (2025)
- [T^2Agent A Tool-augmented Multimodal Misinformation Detection Agent with Monte Carlo Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19768/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computational methods to aid journalists in the task often require adapting a model to specific domains and generating explanations. However, most automated fact-checking methods rely on three-class datasets, which do not accurately reflect real-world misinformation. Moreover, fact-checking explanations are often generated based on text summarization of evidence, failing to address the relationship between the claim and the evidence. To address these issues, we extend the self-rationalization method--typically used in natural language inference (NLI) tasks--to fact verification. We propose a label-adaptive learning approach: first, we fine-tune a model to learn veracity prediction with annotated labels (step-1 model). Then, we fine-tune the step-1 model again to learn self-rationalization, using the same data and additional annotated explanations. Our results show that our label-adaptive approach improves veracity prediction by more than ten percentage points (Macro F1) on both the PubHealth and AVeriTec datasets, outperforming the GPT-4 model. Furthermore, to address the high cost of explanation annotation, we generated 64 synthetic explanations from three large language models: GPT-4-turbo, GPT-3.5-turbo, and Llama-3-8B and few-shot fine-tune our step-1 model. The few-shot synthetic explanation fine-tuned model performed comparably to the fully fine-tuned self-rationalization model, demonstrating the potential of low-budget learning with synthetic data. Our label-adaptive self-rationalization approach presents a promising direction for future research on real-world explainable fact-checking with different labeling schemes.