SemQA: Evaluating Evidence with Question Embeddings and Answer Entailment for Fact Verification

Kjetil Indrehus, Caroline Vannebo, Roxana Pop


Abstract
Automated fact-checking (AFC) of factual claims require efficiency and accuracy. Existing evaluation frameworks like Ev2R achieve strong semantic grounding but incur substantial computational cost, while simpler metrics based on overlap or one-to-one matching often misalign with human judgments. In this paper, we introduce SemQA, a lightweight and accurate evidence-scoring metric that combines transformer-based question scoring with bidirectional NLI entailment on answers. We evaluate SemQA by conducting human evaluations, analyzing correlations with existing metrics, and examining representative examples.
Anthology ID:
2025.fever-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Mubashara Akhtar, Rami Aly, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Oana Cocarascu, Zhijiang Guo, Arpit Mittal, Michael Schlichtkrull, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos
Venues:
FEVER | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
184–200
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.fever-1.14/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kjetil Indrehus, Caroline Vannebo, and Roxana Pop. 2025. SemQA: Evaluating Evidence with Question Embeddings and Answer Entailment for Fact Verification. In Proceedings of the Eighth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER), pages 184–200, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SemQA: Evaluating Evidence with Question Embeddings and Answer Entailment for Fact Verification (Indrehus et al., FEVER 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.fever-1.14.pdf