arXiv Computation and Language By Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Crystina Zhang, Iffat Maab, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Folasade Peace Alabi, Salomey Osei, Saminu Mohammad Aliyu, Nkechinyere Faith Aguobi, Bontu Fufa Balcha, Blessing Kudzaishe Sibanda, Davis David, Mouhamadane Mboup, Daud Abolade, Neo Putini, Philipp Slusallek, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Dietrich Klakow

AfrIFact: Cultural Information Retrieval, Evidence Extraction and Fact Checking for African Languages

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arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

ARAFA: An LLM-Generated Arabic Fact-Checking Dataset

A new large-scale Arabic fact‑checking dataset called Arafa has been created using an automated pipeline that generates claims from Arabic Wikipedia, mutates them into counterfactuals, and validates them against supporting or refuting evidence. The dataset contains 181,976 claim‑evidence pairs labeled as supported, refuted, or not enough information, and human evaluation shows high inter‑annotator agreement and strong validation accuracy. Fine‑tuned transformer models on Arafa achieve a Macro F1‑score of 77%, demonstrating its usefulness for Arabic fact‑checking tasks.

By Christophe Khalil, Shady Elbassuoni, Rida Assaf
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Evaluating and Improving Evidence-Grounded Fact-Checking in LLMs via Multi-Round Evidence Ablation

The paper introduces Fact-Ablated Evaluation (FAE), a framework that iteratively removes cited evidence to test whether large language models (LLMs) adjust their fact‑checking predictions accordingly. Experiments reveal that many off‑the‑shelf LLMs rely more on internal knowledge than on the provided evidence. To address this, the authors propose REAL, a training method that uses counterfactual evidence supervision to encourage LLMs to base veracity judgments on evidence, achieving better evidence‑dependent performance across four datasets.

By Xingyu Deng, Mingzi Cao, Nikolaos Aletras, Xi Wang, Mark Stevenson
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

UrduFactCheck: An Agentic Fact-Checking Framework for Urdu with Evidence Boosting and Benchmarking

The paper introduces UrduFactBench and UrduFactQA, two hand‑annotated benchmarks for claim verification and factual consistency evaluation in Urdu, created through a multi‑stage annotation process with native speakers. It also presents UrduFactCheck, a modular fact‑checking framework that uses both monolingual and translation‑based evidence retrieval to address the scarcity of high‑quality Urdu evidence. Experiments on twelve LLMs show that translation‑augmented pipelines outperform monolingual ones, highlighting ongoing challenges for open‑source models in Urdu.

By Sarfraz Ahmad, Hasan Iqbal, Momina Ahsan, Numaan Naeem, Muhammad Ahsan Riaz Khan, Arham Riaz, Muhammad Arslan Manzoor, Yuxia Wang, Preslav Nakov
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Think Before You Link: Rarity, Reasoning, and Retrieval in Multilingual Entity Linking

The paper introduces a new perspective on entity rarity in multimodal entity linking by using knowledge‑graph structural metrics instead of popularity metrics, revealing many rare entities previously overlooked. Experiments show that state‑of‑the‑art models suffer a 15.4–39.9% accuracy drop on these rare‑entity slices. The authors propose a training‑free framework that combines reasoning and retrieval with a vision‑language model, achieving a 6.9% overall accuracy gain and up to 23.3% improvement on rare entities, and release a new benchmark MERLIN‑Rare for focused evaluation.

By Parinthapat Pengpun, Simran Khanuja, Graham Neubig