# MisSpans: Fine-Grained False Span Identification in Cross-Domain Fake News

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04857 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04857/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [NewsQA: A Machine Comprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09830/) (2016)
- [FakeNewsNet: A Data Repository with News Content, Social Context and Spatialtemporal Information for Studying Fake News on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01286/) (2018)
- [Automatic Detection of Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07104/) (2017)
- [WiCE: Real-World Entailment for Claims in Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01432/) (2023)
- [SciFact-Open: Towards open-domain scientific claim verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13777/) (2022)
- [Factcheck-Bench: Fine-Grained Evaluation Benchmark for Automatic Fact-checkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09000/) (2023)
- [All-in-one: Multi-task Learning for Rumour Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03713/) (2018)
- [AmbiFC: Fact-Checking Ambiguous Claims with Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00640/) (2021)
- [EX-FEVER: A Dataset for Multi-hop Explainable Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09754/) (2023)
- [Fin-Fact: A Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal Financial Fact Checking and Explanation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08793/) (2023)
- [CLUENER2020: Fine-grained Named Entity Recognition Dataset and Benchmark for Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04351/) (2020)
- [RAEmoLLM: Retrieval Augmented LLMs for Cross-Domain Misinformation Detection Using In-Context Learning Based on Emotional Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11093/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Impact of Instruction-Tuning on LLM's Susceptibility to Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18203/) (2025)
- [Towards Fine-Grained Interpretability: Counterfactual Explanations for Misclassification with Saliency Partition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07974/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online misinformation is increasingly pervasive, yet most existing benchmarks and methods evaluate veracity at the level of whole claims or paragraphs using coarse binary labels, obscuring how true and false details often co-exist within single sentences. These simplifications also limit interpretability: global explanations cannot identify which specific segments are misleading or differentiate how a detail is false (e.g., distorted vs. fabricated). To address these gaps, we introduce MisSpans, the first multi-domain, human-annotated benchmark for span-level misinformation detection and analysis, consisting of paired real and fake news stories. MisSpans defines three complementary tasks: MisSpansIdentity for pinpointing false spans within sentences, MisSpansType for categorising false spans by misinformation type, and MisSpansExplanation for providing rationales grounded in identified spans. Together, these tasks enable fine-grained localisation, nuanced characterisation beyond true/false and actionable explanations. Expert annotators were guided by standardised guidelines and consistency checks, leading to high inter-annotator agreement. We evaluate 15 representative LLMs, including reasoning-enhanced and non-reasoning variants, under zero-shot and one-shot settings. Results reveal the challenging nature of fine-grained misinformation identification and analysis, and highlight the need for a deeper understanding of how performance may be influenced by multiple interacting factors, including model size and reasoning capabilities, along with domain-specific textual features. This project will be available at https://github.com/lzw108/MisSpans.