# SciClaimSeekers at CheckThat! 2026: Retrieving Scientific Sources for Social Media Claims with LLM Reranking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24803 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24803/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Fine-Tuning LLaMA for Multi-Stage Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08319/) (2023)
- [Beyond Yes and No: Improving Zero-Shot LLM Rankers via Scoring Fine-Grained Relevance Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14122/) (2023)
- [RankVicuna: Zero-Shot Listwise Document Reranking with Open-Source Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15088/) (2023)
- [An Analysis of Fusion Functions for Hybrid Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11934/) (2022)
- [A Hybrid Retrieval-Generation Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09068/) (2019)
- [SciTweets -- A Dataset and Annotation Framework for Detecting Scientific Online Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07360/) (2022)
- [The CLEF-2026 CheckThat! Lab: Advancing Multilingual Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09516/) (2026)
- [Deep Retrieval at CheckThat! 2025: Identifying Scientific Papers from Implicit Social Media Mentions via Hybrid Retrieval and Re-Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23250/) (2025)
- [AIRwaves at CheckThat! 2025: Retrieving Scientific Sources for Implicit Claims on Social Media with Dual Encoders and Neural Re-Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19509/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scientific claims often spread on social media faster than they can be verified, while posts rarely link to the original scholarly sources. To tackle this problem this paper presents system called SciClaimSeekers, a retrieval and reranking framework by combining BM25 and zero-shot multilingual E5 retrieval with Reciprocal Rank Fusion (k=60), followed by Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct pointwise reranking. The pipeline reaches 64.36% MRR@5 on the English development set a 13.67-point jump over BM25 and 10.17 points over the unranked hybrid and 64.39% on the official test set, in the CLEF-2026 CheckThat! Task 1 evaluation. Our experiment suggests that large pre-trained models, when combined into a careful pipeline, can be competitive with fine-tuned approaches on this task.