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:
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1510.pdf