The development of fact-checking systems for verifying the factuality of text generated by large language models (LLMs) has been advancing.In the verdict prediction step of such systems, the system determines whether claims in the generated text are supported by retrieved evidence, formulated as a natural language inference (NLI) task.This study extends the label set for verdict prediction to capture claim-evidence relationships that humans would commonly interpret as supported or refuted, even in the absence of strict logical entailment or contradiction.It also constructs a Japanese dataset comprising 28,147 instances from two sources based on this extended label set.We analyze the causes of annotation disagreement and find that ambiguity in the boundary of acceptable inference, interpretive characteristics of negative cases, and incomplete information in the evidence affect annotation variability.Using this dataset, we evaluate the performance of prompt-based verdict prediction methods and show that prompts that explicitly elicit chain-of-thought reasoning improve F1 by 4 percentage points compared to baseline.

Fine-tuning in information retrieval systems using pre-trained language models (PLM-based IR) requires learning query representations and query-document relations, in addition to downstream task-specific learning. This study introduces coarse-tuning as an intermediate learning stage that bridges pre-training and fine-tuning. By learning query representations and query-document relations in coarse-tuning, we aim to reduce the load of fine-tuning and improve the learning effect of downstream IR tasks. We propose Query-Document Pair Prediction (QDPP) for coarse-tuning, which predicts the appropriateness of query-document pairs. Evaluation experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves MRR and/or nDCG@5 in four ad-hoc document retrieval datasets. Furthermore, the results of the query prediction task suggested that coarse-tuning facilitated learning of query representation and query-document relations.