HintsOfTruth: A Multimodal Checkworthiness Detection Dataset with Real and Synthetic Claims

Michiel Van Der Meer, Pavel Korshunov, Sébastien Marcel, Lonneke Van Der Plas


Abstract
Misinformation can be countered with fact-checking, but the process is costly and slow. Identifying checkworthy claims is the first step, where automation can help scale fact-checkers’ efforts. However, detection methods struggle with content that is (1) multimodal, (2) from diverse domains, and (3) synthetic. We introduce HintsOfTruth, a public dataset for multimodal checkworthiness detection with 27K real-world and synthetic image/claim pairs. The mix of real and synthetic data makes this dataset unique and ideal for benchmarking detection methods. We compare fine-tuned and prompted Large Language Models (LLMs). We find that well-configured lightweight text-based encoders perform comparably to multimodal models but the former only focus on identifying non-claim-like content. Multimodal LLMs can be more accurate but come at a significant computational cost, making them impractical for large-scale applications. When faced with synthetic data, multimodal models perform more robustly.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.1510
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
31274–31291
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1510/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michiel Van Der Meer, Pavel Korshunov, Sébastien Marcel, and Lonneke Van Der Plas. 2025. HintsOfTruth: A Multimodal Checkworthiness Detection Dataset with Real and Synthetic Claims. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 31274–31291, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HintsOfTruth: A Multimodal Checkworthiness Detection Dataset with Real and Synthetic Claims (Van Der Meer et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1510.pdf