# +VeriRel: Verification Feedback to Enhance Document Retrieval for Scientific Fact Checking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11122 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11122/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06146/) (2019)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14974/) (2020)
- [Document Ranking with a Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06713/) (2020)
- [Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09542/) (2023)
- [Explainable Automated Fact-Checking for Public Health Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09926/) (2020)
- [MultiVerS: Improving scientific claim verification with weak supervision and full-document context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01640/) (2021)
- [SciFact-Open: Towards open-domain scientific claim verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13777/) (2022)
- [Inferring Which Medical Treatments Work from Reports of Clinical Trials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01606/) (2019)
- [Scientific Fact-Checking: A Survey of Resources and Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16859/) (2023)
- [Information Retrieval: Recent Advances and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08801/) (2023)
- [Scientific Claim Verification with VERT5ERINI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11930/) (2020)
- [Evidence Inference 2.0: More Data, Better Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04177/) (2020)
- [A Paragraph-level Multi-task Learning Model for Scientific Fact-Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14500/) (2020)
- [CoVERT: A Corpus of Fact-checked Biomedical COVID-19 Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12164/) (2022)
- [Check-COVID: Fact-Checking COVID-19 News Claims with Scientific Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18265/) (2023)
- [Abstract, Rationale, Stance: A Joint Model for Scientific Claim Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15116/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Passage Embeddings for Efficient Listwise Reranking with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14848/) (2024)
- [Claim Detection in Biomedical Twitter Posts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11639/) (2021)
- [Overview and Insights from the SciVer Shared Task on Scientific Claim Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08188/) (2021)
- [Read it Twice: Towards Faithfully Interpretable Fact Verification by Revisiting Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03507/) (2023)
- [From Relevance to Utility: Evidence Retrieval with Feedback for Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11675/) (2023)
- [The Next Phase of Scientific Fact-Checking: Advanced Evidence Retrieval from Complex Structured Academic Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20844/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [MR-Align: Meta-Reasoning Informed Factuality Alignment for Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24794/) (2025)
- [Evaluating and Improving Evidence-Grounded Fact-Checking in LLMs via Multi-Round Evidence Ablation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08943/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Identification of appropriate supporting evidence is critical to the success of scientific fact checking. However, existing approaches rely on off-the-shelf Information Retrieval algorithms that rank documents based on relevance rather than the evidence they provide to support or refute the claim being checked. This paper proposes +VeriRel which includes verification success in the document ranking. Experimental results on three scientific fact checking datasets (SciFact, SciFact-Open and Check-Covid) demonstrate consistently leading performance by +VeriRel for document evidence retrieval and a positive impact on downstream verification. This study highlights the potential of integrating verification feedback to document relevance assessment for effective scientific fact checking systems. It shows promising future work to evaluate fine-grained relevance when examining complex documents for advanced scientific fact checking.