Predicting narrative similarity can be under-stood as an inherently interpretive task: differ-ent, equally valid readings of the same text canproduce divergent interpretations and thus dif-ferent similarity judgments, posing a fundamen-tal challenge for semantic evaluation bench-marks that encode a single ground truth. Ratherthan treating this multiperspectivity as a chal-lenge to overcome, we propose to incorporateit in the decision making process of predic-tive systems. To explore this strategy, we cre-ated an ensemble of 31 LLM personas. Theserange from practitioners following interpretiveframeworks to more intuitive, lay-style charac-ters. Our experiments were conducted on theSemEval-2026 Task 4 dataset, where the sys-tem ranked 13th out of 47 teams and achievedan accuracy score of 0.705. Accuracy improveswith ensemble size, consistent with CondorcetJury Theorem-like dynamics under weakenedindependence. Practitioner personas performworse individually but produce less correlatederrors, yielding larger ensemble gains undermajority voting. Our error analysis reveals aconsistent negative association between gender-focused interpretive vocabulary and accuracyacross all persona categories, suggesting ei-ther attention to dimensions not relevant for thebenchmark or valid interpretations absent fromthe ground truth. This finding underscores theneed for evaluation frameworks that accountfor interpretive plurality.

Automatically verifying climate-related claims against scientific literature is a challenging task, complicated by the specialised nature of scholarly evidence and the diversity of rhetorical strategies underlying climate disinformation. ClimateCheck 2026 is the second iteration of a shared task addressing this challenge, expanding on the 2025 edition with tripled training data and a new disinformation narrative classification task. Running from January to February 2026 on the CodaBench platform, the competition attracted 20 registered participants and 8 leaderboard submissions, with systems combining dense retrieval pipelines, cross-encoder ensembles, and large language models with structured hierarchical reasoning. In addition to standard evaluation metrics (Recall@K and Binary Preference), we adapt an automated framework to assess retrieval quality under incomplete annotations, exposing systematic biases in how conventional metrics rank systems. A cross-task analysis further reveals that not all climate disinformation is equally verifiable, potentially implicating how future fact-checking systems should be designed.

Climate disinformation evolves faster than the fixed taxonomies used to detect it. Thus, we re-frame narrative detection as a retrieval task: given a narrative’s core message as a query, rank texts from a corpus by alignment with that narrative. This formulation requires no predefined label set and can accommodate emerging narratives. We repurpose three climate disinformation datasets (CARDS, Climate Obstruction, climate change subset of PolyNarrative) for retrieval evaluation and propose SpecFi, a framework that generates hypothetical documents to bridge the gap between abstract narrative descriptions and their concrete textual instantiations. SpecFi uses community summaries from graph-based community detection as few-shot examples for generation, achieving a MAP of 0.505 on CARDS without access to narrative labels. We further introduce narrative variance, an embedding-based difficulty metric, and show via partial correlation analysis that standard retrieval degrades on high-variance narratives (BM25 loses 63.4% of MAP), while SpecFi-CS remains robust (32.7% loss). Our analysis also reveals that unsupervised community summaries converge on descriptions close to expert-crafted taxonomies, suggesting that graph-based methods can surface narrative structure from unlabeled text.

Fact-checking articles encode rich supporting evidence and reasoning, yet this evidence remains largely inaccessible to automated verification systems due to unstructured presentation. We introduce PrimeFacts, a methodology and resource for extracting fine-grained evidence from full fact-checking articles. We compile 13,106 PolitiFact articles with claims, verdicts, and all referenced sources, and we identify 49,718 in-article hyperlinks as natural anchors to pinpoint key evidence. Our framework leverages large language models (LLMs) to rewrite these anchor sentences into stand-alone, context-independent premises and investigates the extraction of additional implicit evidence. In evaluations on cross-article evidence retrieval and claim verification, the extracted premises substantially improve performance. Decontextualized evidence yields higher retrievability, achieving up to a 30% relative gain in Mean Reciprocal Rank over verbatim sentences, and using the evidence for verdict prediction raises Macro-F₁ by 10-20 points over the baseline. These gains are consistent across different verdict granularities (2-class vs. 5-class) and model architectures. A qualitative analysis indicates that the decontextualized premises remain faithful to the original sources. Our work highlights the promise of reusing fact-checkers’ evidence for automation and provides a large-scale resource of structured evidence from real-world fact-checks.

Propaganda detection in social media is challenging due to noisy, short texts and low annotation agreements. We introduce a new intent-focused taxonomy of propaganda techniques and compare it against an established, higher-agreement schema. Along three dimensions (model portfolio, schema effects, and prompting strategy) we evaluate the taxonomies as a classification task with the help of four language models (GPT-4.1-nano, Phi-4 14B, Qwen2.5-14B, Qwen3-14B). Our results show that fine-tuning is essential, since it transforms weak zero-shot baselines into competitive systems and reveals methodological differences that are hidden using base models. Across schemas, the Qwen models achieve the strongest overall performance, and Phi-4 14B consistently outperforms GPT-4.1-nano. Our hierarchical prompting method (HiPP), which predicts fine-grained techniques before aggregating them, is especially beneficial after fine-tuning and on the more ambiguous, low-agreement taxonomy, while remaining competitive on the simpler schema. The HQP dataset, annotated with the new intent-based labels, provides a richer lens on propaganda’s strategic goals and a challenging benchmark for future work on robust, real-world detection.

Multimodal fact checking has become increasingly important due to the predominance of visual content on social media platforms, where images are frequently used to enhance the credibility and spread of misleading claims, while generated images become more prevalent and realistic as generative models advance. Incorporating visual information, however, substantially increases computational costs, raising critical efficiency concerns for practical deployment. In this study, we propose and evaluate the ADA-AGGR (ensemble retrievAl for multimoDAl evidence AGGRegation) pipeline, which achieved the second place on both the dev and test leaderboards of the FEVER 9/AVerImaTeC shared task. However, long runtimes per claim highlight challenges regarding efficiency concerns when designing multimodal claim verification pipelines. We therefore run extensive ablation studies and configuration analyses to identify possible performance–runtime improvements. Our experiments show that substantial efficiency gains are possible without significant loss in verification quality. For instance, we reduced the average runtime by up to 6.28× while maintaining comparable performance across evaluation metrics by aggressively downsampling input images processed by visual language models. Overall, our results highlight that careful design choices are crucial for building scalable and resource-efficient multimodal fact-checking systems suitable for real-world deployment.

Temporal language does more than place events on a timeline. In news discourse, references to the past, present, and future can function as rhetorical devices that shape interpretation and persuasion. Here, we study temporal framing, defined as the persuasive use of time-related language to structure meaning rather than to report chronology. We propose a taxonomy of eight temporal frames grounded in prior work on temporality and framing, and we realize it through expert annotation of a multilingual news corpus. The resulting dataset includes 458 English and German news articles, with over 2K temporally framed sentences and approximately 3K temporal framing annotations identified from a corpus of more than 20K sentences. We analyze frame prevalence, co-occurrence patterns, and lexical cues, and evaluate temporal framing detection using supervised fine-tuning and zero-shot classification. Our experiments show that temporal framing is learnable at the sentence level, with supervised models substantially outperforming zero-shot approaches. We publicly release the corpus to support future research on temporal framing: https://mbzuai-nlp.github.io/temporal-framing/.

The overwhelming volume of content being published at any given moment poses a significant challenge for the design of automated fact-checking (AFC) systems on social media, requiring an emphasized consideration of efficiency aspects.As in other fields, systems built upon LLMs have achieved good results on different AFC benchmarks. However, the application of LLMs is accompanied by high resource requirements. The energy consumption of LLMs poses a significant challenge from an ecological perspective, while remaining a bottleneck in latency-sensitive scenarios like AFC within social media. Therefore, we propose a system built upon fine-tuned smaller BERT-based models. When evaluated on the ClimateCheck dataset against decoder-only LLMs, our best fine-tuned model outperforms Phi 4 and approaches Qwen3 14B in reasoning mode — while significantly reducing runtime per claim. Our findings demonstrate that small encoder-only models fine-tuned for specific tasks can still provide a substantive alternative to large decoder-only LLMs, especially in efficiency-concerned settings.

Given the limited computational and financial resources of news agencies, real-life usage of fact-checking systems requires fast response times. For this reason, our submission to the FEVER-8 claim verification shared task focuses on optimizing the efficiency of such pipelines built around subtasks such as evidence retrieval and veracity prediction. We propose the Semantic Filtering for Efficient Fact Checking (SFEFC) strategy, which is inspired by the FEVER-8 baseline and designed with the goal of reducing the number of LLM calls and other computationally expensive subroutines. Furthermore, we explore the reuse of cosine similarities initially calculated within a dense retrieval step to retrieve the top 10 most relevant evidence sentence sets. We use these sets for semantic filtering methods based on similarity scores and create filters for particularly hard classification labels “Not Enough Information” and “Conflicting Evidence/Cherrypicking” by identifying thresholds for potentially relevant information and the semantic variance within these sets. Compared to the parallelized FEVER-8 baseline, which takes 33.88 seconds on average to process a claim according to the FEVER-8 shared task leaderboard, our non-parallelized system remains competitive in regard to AVeriTeC retrieval scores while reducing the runtime to 7.01 seconds, achieving the fastest average runtime per claim.