# Towards Automated Fact-Checking of Real-World Claims: Exploring Task Formulation and Assessment with LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08909 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08909/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (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)
- [MultiFC: A Real-World Multi-Domain Dataset for Evidence-Based Fact Checking of Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03242/) (2019)
- [Fact-Checking Complex Claims with Program-Guided Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12744/) (2023)
- [Generating Fact Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05773/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Multimodal Fact-Checking and Explanation Generation: A Challenging Dataset and Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12487/) (2022)
- [Explainable Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03870/) (2020)
- [A Richly Annotated Corpus for Different Tasks in Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01214/) (2019)
- [Explainable Claim Verification via Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05253/) (2023)
- [Explain and Predict, and then Predict Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04109/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking the Generation of Fact Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15202/) (2023)
- [Automated Justification Production for Claim Veracity in Fact Checking: A Survey on Architectures and Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12853/) (2024)
- [Surprising Efficacy of Fine-Tuned Transformers for Fact-Checking over Larger Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12147/) (2024)
- [Towards a Framework for Evaluating Explanations in Automated Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20322/) (2024)

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

- [Hybrid Annotation for Propaganda Detection: Integrating LLM Pre-Annotations with Human Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18343/) (2025)
- [Assessing the Potential of Generative Agents in Crowdsourced Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19940/) (2025)
- [Document-Level Tabular Numerical Cross-Checking: A Coarse-to-Fine Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13328/) (2025)
- [XplaiNLP at CheckThat! 2025: Multilingual Subjectivity Detection with Finetuned Transformers and Prompt-Based Inference with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12130/) (2025)
- [Use of Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Agent for Long-Form COVID-19 Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00007/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fact-checking is necessary to address the increasing volume of misinformation. Traditional fact-checking relies on manual analysis to verify claims, but it is slow and resource-intensive. This study establishes baseline comparisons for Automated Fact-Checking (AFC) using Large Language Models (LLMs) across multiple labeling schemes (binary, three-class, five-class) and extends traditional claim verification by incorporating analysis, verdict classification, and explanation in a structured setup to provide comprehensive justifications for real-world claims. We evaluate Llama-3 models of varying sizes (3B, 8B, 70B) on 17,856 claims collected from PolitiFact (2007-2024) using evidence retrieved via restricted web searches. We utilize TIGERScore as a reference-free evaluation metric to score the justifications. Our results show that larger LLMs consistently outperform smaller LLMs in classification accuracy and justification quality without fine-tuning. We find that smaller LLMs in a one-shot scenario provide comparable task performance to fine-tuned Small Language Models (SLMs) with large context sizes, while larger LLMs consistently surpass them. Evidence integration improves performance across all models, with larger LLMs benefiting most. Distinguishing between nuanced labels remains challenging, emphasizing the need for further exploration of labeling schemes and alignment with evidences. Our findings demonstrate the potential of retrieval-augmented AFC with LLMs.