(Fact) Check Your Bias

Eivind Morris Bakke, Nora Winger Heggelund


Abstract
Automatic fact verification systems increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs). We investigate how parametric knowledge biases in these models affect fact-checking outcomes of the HerO system (baseline for FEVER-25). We examine how the system is affected by: (1) potential bias in Llama 3.1’s parametric knowledge and (2) intentionally injected bias. When prompted directly to perform fact-verification, Llama 3.1 labels nearly half the claims as “Not Enough Evidence”. Using only its parametric knowledge it is able to reach a verdict on the remaining half of the claims. In the second experiment, we prompt the model to generate supporting, refuting, or neutral fact-checking documents. These prompts significantly influence retrieval outcomes, with approximately 50% of retrieved evidence being unique to each perspective. Notably, the model sometimes refuses to generate supporting documents for claims it believes to be false, creating an inherent negative bias. Despite differences in retrieved evidence, final verdict predictions show stability across prompting strategies. The code is available at: https://github.com/eibakke/FEVER-8-Shared-Task
Anthology ID:
2025.fever-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Mubashara Akhtar, Rami Aly, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Oana Cocarascu, Zhijiang Guo, Arpit Mittal, Michael Schlichtkrull, James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos
Venues:
FEVER | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
162–178
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.fever-1.12/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eivind Morris Bakke and Nora Winger Heggelund. 2025. (Fact) Check Your Bias. In Proceedings of the Eighth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER), pages 162–178, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
(Fact) Check Your Bias (Bakke & Heggelund, FEVER 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.fever-1.12.pdf