United States

This paper presents UHH’s approach developed for the AVeriTeC shared task. The goal of the challenge is to verify given real-world claims with evidences from the Web. In this shared task, we investigate a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model, which mainly contains retrieval, generation, and augmentation components. We start with the selection of the top 10k evidences via BM25 scores, and continue with two approaches to retrieve the most similar evidences: (1) to retrieve top 10 evidences through vector similarity, generate questions for them, and rerank them or (2) to generate questions for the claim and retrieve the most similar evidence, again, through vector similarity. After retrieving the top evidences, a Large Language Model (LLM) is prompted using the claim along with either all evidences or individual evidence to predict the label. Our system submission, UHH, using the first approach and individual evidence prompts, ranks 6th out of 23 systems.

EMNLP 2024

UHH at AVeriTeC: RAG for Fact-Checking with Real-World Claims

rag for real-world claims

real-world claims

fact-checking

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The AVeriTeC shared task introduces a new real-word claim verification dataset, where a system is tasked to verify a real-world claim based on the evidence found in the internet. In this paper, we proposed a claim verification pipeline called QueenVer which consists of 2 modules, Evidence Retrieval and Claim Verification. Our pipeline collects pairs of <Question, Answer> as the evidence. Recognizing the pivotal role of question quality in the evidence efficacy, we proposed question enrichment to enhance the retrieved evidence. Specifically, we adopt three different Question Generation (QG) technique, muti-hop, single-hop, and Fact-checker style. For the claim verification module, we integrate an ensemble of multiple state-of-the-art LLM to enhance its robustness. Experiments show that QueenVC achieves 0.41, 0.29, and 0.42 on Q, Q+A, and AVeriTeC scores.

Improving Evidence Retrieval on Claim Verification Pipeline through Question Enrichment

The approach of team, Dunamu-ml, to the AveriTeC shared task.

Dunamu-ml's Submissions on AVERITEC Shared Task

This paper describes the FZI-WIM system at the AVeriTeC shared Task, which aims to as- sess evidence-based automated fact-checking systems for real-world claims with evidence retrieved from the web. The FZI-WIM system utilizes open-source models to build a reliable fact-checking pipeline via question-answering. With different experimental setups, we show that more questions lead to higher scores in the shared task. Both in question generation and question-answering stages, sampling can be a way to improve the performance of our system. We further analyze the limitations of current open-source models for real-world claim verifi- cation. Our code is publicly available.

FZI-WIM at AVeriTeC Shared Task: Real-World Fact-Checking with Question Answering

Given the widespread dissemination of misinformation on social media, implementing fact-checking mechanisms for online claims is essential. Manually verifying every claim is very challenging, underscoring the need for an automated fact-checking system. This paper presents our system designed to address this issue. We utilize the Averitec dataset (Schlichtkrull et al., 2023) to assess the performance of our fact-checking system. In addition to veracity prediction, our system provides supporting evidence, which is extracted from the dataset. We develop a Retrieve and Generate (RAG) pipeline to extract relevant evidence sentences from a knowledge base, which are then inputted along with the claim into a large language model (LLM) for classification. We also evaluate the few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities of multiple LLMs. Our system achieves an ’Averitec’ score of 0.33, which is a 22% absolute improvement over the baseline. Our Code is publicly available on https://github.com/ronit-singhal/evidence- backed-fact-checking-using-rag-and-few-shot- in-context-learning-with-llms.

Evidence-backed Fact Checking using RAG and Few-Shot In-Context Learning with LLMs

As part of the AVeriTeC shared task, we developed a pipelined system comprising robust and finely tuned models. Our system integrates advanced techniques for evidence retrieval and question generation, leveraging cross-encoders and large language models (LLMs) for optimal performance. With multi-stage processing, the pipeline demonstrates improvements over baseline models, particularly in handling complex claims that require nuanced reasoning by improved evidence extraction, question generation and veracity prediction. Through detailed experiments and ablation studies, we provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of our approach, highlighting the critical role of evidence sufficiency and context dependency in automated fact-checking systems. Our system secured a competitive rank, 7th on the development and 12th on the test data, in the shared task, underscoring the effectiveness of our methods in addressing the challenges of real-world claim verification.

SK_DU Team: Cross-Encoder based Evidence Retrieval and Question Generation with Improved Prompt for the AVeriTeC Shared Task

We present the Information-Retrieving Fact-Checker (InFact), the fact-checking system which won the AVeriTeC shared task. InFact is an LLM-based 6-stage pipeline. It performs best with GPT-4o.

InFact: A Strong Baseline for Automated Fact-Checking

Automated Fact-Checking (AFC) has recently gained considerable attention to address the increasing misinformation spreading in the web and social media. The recently introduced AVeriTeC dataset alleviates some limitations of existing AFC benchmarks. In this paper, we propose to explore Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and describe the system (UPS participant) we implemented to solve the AVeriTeC shared task. Our end-to-end system integrates retrieval and generation in a joint training setup to enhance evidence retrieval and question generation. Our system operates as follows: First, we conduct dense retrieval of evidence by encoding candidate evidence sentences from the provided knowledge store documents. Next, we perform a secondary retrieval of question-answer pairs from the training set, encoding these into dense vectors to support question generation with relevant in-context examples. During training, the question generator is optimized to generate questions based on retrieved or gold evidence. In preliminary automatic evaluation, our system achieved respectively 0.198 and 0.210 AVeriTeC scores on the dev and test sets.

Exploring Retrieval Augmented Generation For Real-world Claim Verification

In the information era, the vast proliferation of online content poses significant challenges, particularly concerning the trustworthiness of these digital statements, which can have profound societal implications. Although it is possible to manually annotate and verify the authenticity of such content, the sheer volume and rapid pace of information generation render this approach impractical, both in terms of time and cost. Therefore, it is imperative to develop automated systems capable of validating online claims, ensuring that users can use the wealth of information available on the Internet effectively and reliably. Using primarily ChatGPT and the Google search API, GProofT fact checking framework generates question-answer pairs to systematically extract and verify the facts within claims. Based on the outcomes of these QA pairs, claims are subsequently labeled as Supported, Conflicted Evidence/Cherry-Picking, or Refuted. Shown by extensive experiments, GProofT Retrieval generally performs effectively in fact-checking and makes a substantial contribution to the task.

GProofT: A Multi-dimension Multi-round Fact Checking Framework Based on Claim Fact Extraction

To tackle the AVeriTeC shared task hosted by the FEVER-24, we introduce a system that only employs publicly available large language models (LLMs) for each step of automated fact-checking, dubbed the Herd of Open LLMs for verifying real-world claims (HerO). For evidence retrieval, a language model is used to enhance a query by generating hypothetical fact-checking documents. We prompt pretrained and fine-tuned LLMs for question generation and veracity prediction by crafting prompts with retrieved in-context samples. HerO achieved 2nd place on the leaderboard with the AVeriTeC score of 0.57, suggesting the potential of open LLMs for verifying real-world claims. For future research, we make our code publicly available

The Herd of Open LLMs for Verifying Real-World Claims

Our paper and presentation describe our 3rd place submission in the AVeriTeC shared task in which we attempted to address the challenge of fact-checking with evidence retrieved in the wild using a simple scheme of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) designed for the task, leveraging the predictive power of Large Language Models. We release our codebase and explain its two modules - the Retriever and the Evidence & Label generator - in detail, justifying their features such as MMR-reranking and Likert-scale confidence estimation. We evaluate our solution on AVeriTeC dev and test set and interpret the results, picking the GPT-4o as the most appropriate model for our pipeline at the time of our publication, with Llama 3.1 70B being a promising open-source alternative. We perform an empirical error analysis to see that faults in our predictions often coincide with noise in the data or ambiguous fact-checks, provoking further research and data augmentation.

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