DS@GT ARC at CheckThat! 2026: A Verdict-Anchored Pipeline for Generating Fact-Checking Articles
Authors: Hoang Thanh Thanh Truong, Shuyu Tian
arXiv: 2611.05382 [cs.CL]
Submitted: 30 July 2026
Venue: CLEF 2026 Working Notes, 21–24 September 2026, Jena, Germany
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
ACM Classes: I.2.7; H.3.3
DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.05382
Abstract
Misinformation spreads faster than professional fact-checkers can manually verify it and write articles explaining their verdicts. This creates a pressing need to automate the production of fact-checking articles. This paper details work by the DS@GT ARC team for CLEF 2026 CheckThat! Lab Task 3: Fact-Checking Article Generation. The goal is to generate a full fact-checking article from a claim, its original verdict, and a set of scraped source documents. Our team built a four-stage pipeline that (1) cleans noisy evidence, (2) retrieves and clusters relevant sources, (3) generates the article by conditioning Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct on the original fact-checker verdict, and (4) recovers inline citations through deterministic post-processing. We achieved a mean score of 0.428 and ranked 3rd out of 9 teams for CLEF 2026 CheckThat! Lab Task 3, compared to a baseline mean score of 0.272. Our code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/dsgt-arc/checkthat-2026-task3.
Method Overview
The proposed system is a four-stage, verdict-anchored pipeline:
- Evidence cleaning — noisy scraped documents are preprocessed to remove irrelevant or low-quality content.
- Retrieval and clustering — relevant sources are retrieved and grouped to support coherent article construction.
- Verdict-conditioned generation — Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct generates the article conditioned on the original fact-checker verdict, ensuring alignment with the established conclusion.
- Deterministic citation recovery — inline citations are restored through post-processing, improving traceability and verifiability.
- Mean score: 0.428
- Ranking: 3rd out of 9 teams
- Baseline mean score: 0.272
- Comments: CLEF 2026 Working Notes, 21–24 September 2026, Jena, Germany
- Cite as: arXiv:2611.05382 [cs.CL]
- Submission history: [v1] Submitted 30 July 2026
Results
Additional Metadata
Code
Available on GitHub: https://github.com/dsgt-arc/checkthat-2026-task3
via ArXiv CL+LG