Automatic fact-checking aims to support professional fact-checkers by offering tools that can help speed up manual fact-checking. Yet, existing frameworks fail to address the key step of producing output suitable for broader dissemination to the general public: While human fact-checkers communicate their findings through fact-checking articles, automated systems typically produce little or no justification for their assessments. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we argue for the need to extend the typical automatic fact-checking pipeline with automatic generation of full fact-checking articles. We first identify key desiderata for such articles through a series of interviews with experts from leading fact-checking organizations. We then develop Qraft, an LLM-based agentic framework that mimics the writing workflow of human fact-checkers. Finally, we assess the practical usefulness of Qraft through human evaluations with professional fact-checkers. Our evaluation shows that while Qraft outperforms several previously proposed text-generation approaches, it lags considerably behind expert-written articles. We hope that our work will enable further research in this new and important direction. The code for our implementation is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/qraft.git.

Large language models remain predominantly English-centric, which limits their utility for underrepresented languages. We help bridge this gap for Hindi with Llama-3-Nanda-10B-Chat (aka Nanda-10B) and Llama-3.1-Nanda-87B-Chat (aka Nanda-87B), forming the Nanda family of open-weight bilingual models (https://github.com/MBZUAI-IFM/Nanda-Family). Our approach integrates: (i) a tokenizer extending Llama’s vocabulary with 20% Hindi-specific tokens, thus halving Hindi tokenization fertility while preserving English efficiency, (ii) Hindi-first parameter-efficient continual pretraining using Llama Pro on a 65B-token corpus spanning Devanagari script, code-mixed, and Romanized Hindi, and (iii) bilingual instruction and safety alignment on a large culturally grounded dataset. The resulting Nanda models outperform open-weight LLMs of comparable size: Nanda-87B yields high generative quality, and Nanda-10B shows competitive general-purpose performance. Nanda-87B demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on summarization, translation, transliteration, and instruction following. Moreover, both models achieve state-of-the-art performance in safety and in cultural knowledge. Our results demonstrate that careful tokenizer design, data curation, and continual pretraining can yield capable and safe LLMs for resource-poor languages without compromising English performance.

Fact-checking long-form text is challenging, and it is therefore common practice to break it down into multiple atomic claims. The typical approach to fact-checking these atomic claims involves retrieving a fixed number of pieces of evidence, followed by a verification step. However, this method is usually not cost-effective, as it underutilizes the verification model’s internal knowledge of the claim and fails to replicate the iterative reasoning process in human search strategies. To address these limitations, we propose FIRE, a novel agent-based framework that integrates evidence retrieval and claim verification in an iterative manner. Specifically, FIRE employs a unified mechanism to decide whether to provide a final answer or generate a subsequent search query, based on its confidence in the current judgment. We compare FIRE with other strong fact-checking frameworks and find that it achieves slightly better performance while reducing large language model (LLM) costs by an average of 7.6 times and search costs by 16.5 times. These results indicate that FIRE holds promise for application in large-scale fact-checking operations.