@inproceedings{qazi-etal-2025-retrieval,
    title = "When retrieval outperforms generation: Dense evidence retrieval for scalable fake news detection",
    author = "Qazi, Alamgir Munir  and
      McCrae, John Philip  and
      Nasir, Jamal",
    editor = "Alam, Mehwish  and
      Tchechmedjiev, Andon  and
      Gracia, Jorge  and
      Gromann, Dagmar  and
      di Buono, Maria Pia  and
      Monti, Johanna  and
      Ionov, Maxim",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge",
    month = sep,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Naples, Italy",
    publisher = "Unior Press",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ldl-25-ingestion/2025.ldk-1.26/",
    pages = "255--265",
    ISBN = "978-88-6719-333-2",
    abstract = "9 The proliferation of misinformation necessitates robust yet computationally efficient fact verification systems. While current state-of-the-art approaches leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating explanatory rationales, these methods face significant computational barriers and hallucination risks in real-world deployments. We present DeReC (Dense Retrieval Classification), a lightweight framework that demonstrates how general-purpose text embeddings can effectively replace autoregressive LLM-based approaches in fact verification tasks. By combining dense retrieval with specialized classification, our system achieves better accuracy while being significantly more efficient. DeReC outperforms explanation-generating LLMs in efficiency, reducing runtime by 95{\%} on RAWFC (23 minutes 36 seconds compared to 454 minutes 12 seconds) and by 92{\%} on LIAR-RAW (134 minutes 14 seconds compared to 1692 minutes 23 seconds), showcasing its effectiveness across varying dataset sizes. On the RAWFC dataset, DeReC achieves an F1 score of 65.58{\%}, surpassing the state-of-the-art method L-Defense (61.20{\%}). Our results demonstrate that carefully engineered retrieval-based systems can match or exceed LLM performance in specialized tasks while being significantly more practical for real-world deployment."
}