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:
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.136.pdf