Multi-Agent Cross-Lingual Veracity Assessment for Explainable Fake News Detection

Bassamtiano Renaufalgi Irnawan, Yoshimi Suzuki, Noriko Tomuro, Fumiyo Fukumoto


Abstract
The spread of fake news during the COVID-19 pandemic era triggered widespread chaos and confusion globally, causing public panic and misdirected health behavior. Automated fact checking in non-English languages is challenging due to the low availability of trusted resources. There are several prior work that attempted automated fact checking in multilingual settings. However, most of them fine-tune pre-trained language models (PLMs) and only produce veracity prediction without providing explanations. The absence of explanatory reasoning in these models reduces the credibility of their predictions. This paper proposes a multi-agent explainable cross-lingual fake news detection method that leverages credible English evidence and Large Language Models (LLMs) to verify and generate explanations for non-English claims, overcoming the scarcity of non-English evidence. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs well across three non-English written multilingual COVID-19 datasets in terms of veracity predictions and explanations. Our source code is available online. (https://github.com/bassamtiano/crosslingual_efnd)
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-ijcnlp.136
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2195–2213
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.136/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bassamtiano Renaufalgi Irnawan, Yoshimi Suzuki, Noriko Tomuro, and Fumiyo Fukumoto. 2025. Multi-Agent Cross-Lingual Veracity Assessment for Explainable Fake News Detection. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2195–2213, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Agent Cross-Lingual Veracity Assessment for Explainable Fake News Detection (Irnawan et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.136.pdf