Retrieve-Refine-Calibrate: A Framework for Complex Claim Fact-Checking

Fact-checking aims to verify the truthfulness of a claim based on the retrieved evidence. Existing methods typically follow a decomposition paradigm, in which a claim is broken down into sub-claims that are individually verified. However, the decomposition paradigm may introduce noise to the verification process due to irrelevant entities or evidence, ultimately degrading verification accuracy. To address this problem, we propose a Retrieve-Refine-Calibrate (RRC) framework based on large language models (LLMs). Specifically, the framework first identifies the entities mentioned in the claim and retrieves evidence relevant to them. Then, it refines the retrieved evidence based on the claim to reduce irrelevant information. Finally, it calibrates the verification process by re-evaluating low-confidence predictions. Experiments on two popular fact-checking datasets (HOVER and FEVEROUS-S) demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance compared with competitive baselines.