With the rapid growth of social network services, misinformation has spread uncontrollably. Most recent approaches to fake news detection use neural network models to predict whether the input text is fake or real. Some of them even provide explanations, in addition to veracity, generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). However, they do not utilize factual evidence, nor do they allude to it or provide evidence/justification, thereby making their predictions less credible. This paper proposes a new fake news detection method that predicts the truth or false-hood of a claim based on relevant factual evidence (if exists) or LLM’s inference mechanisms (such as common-sense reasoning) otherwise. Our method produces the final synthesized prediction, along with well-founded facts or reasoning. Experimental results on several large COVID-19 fake news datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) detection and evidence explanation performance. Our source codes are available online.

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)

Unlike document-level AI-generated text (AIGT) detection, sentence-level AIGT detection remains underexplored, despite its importance for addressing collaborative writing scenarios where humans modify AIGT suggestions on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Prior sentence-level detectors often neglect the valuable context surrounding the target sentence, which may contain crucial linguistic artifacts that indicate a potential change in authorship. We propose **GL-CLiC**, a novel technique that leverages both **G**lobal and **L**ocal signals of **C**oherence and **L**ex**i**cal **C**omplexity, which we operationalize through discourse analysis and CEFR-based vocabulary sophistication. **GL-CLiC** models local coherence and lexical complexity by examining a sentence’s relationship with its neighbors or peers, complemented with its document-wide analysis. Our experimental results show that **GL-CLiC** achieves superior performance and better generalization across domains compared to existing methods.