Dis2Dis: Explaining Ambiguity in Fact-Checking

Ieva Staliunaite, Andreas Vlachos


Abstract
Ambiguity is a linguistic tool for encoding information efficiently, yet it also causes misunderstandings and disagreements. It is particularly relevant to the domain of misinformation, as fact-checking ambiguous claims is difficult even for experts. In this paper we argue that instead of predicting a veracity label for which there is genuine disagreement, it would be more beneficial to explain the ambiguity. Thus, this work introduces claim disambiguation, a constrained generation task, for explaining ambiguous claims in fact-checking. This involves editing them to spell out an interpretation that can then be unequivocally supported by the given evidence. We collect a dataset of 1501 such claim revisions and conduct experiments with sequence-to-sequence models. The performance is compared to a simple copy baseline and a Large Language Model baseline. The best results are achieved by employing Minimum Bayes Decoding, with a BertScore F1 of 92.22. According to human evaluation, the model successfully disambiguates the claims 72% of the time.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-naacl.14
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
246–267
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.14/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Ieva Staliunaite and Andreas Vlachos. 2025. Dis2Dis: Explaining Ambiguity in Fact-Checking. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025, pages 246–267, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dis2Dis: Explaining Ambiguity in Fact-Checking (Staliunaite & Vlachos, Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.14.pdf