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Towards LLM-based Fact Verification on News Claims with a Hierarchical Step-by-Step Prompting Method

30 Sep 2023arXiv:2310.00305archive 2025-07-28

Xuan Zhang, Wei Gao

While large pre-trained language models (LLMs) have shown their impressive capabilities in various NLP tasks, they are still under-explored in the misinformation domain. In this paper, we examine LLMs with in-context learning (ICL) for news claim verification, and find that only with 4-shot demonstration examples, the performance of several prompting methods can be comparable with previous supervised models. To further boost performance, we introduce a Hierarchical Step-by-Step (HiSS) prompting method which directs LLMs to separate a claim into several subclaims and then verify each of them via multiple questions-answering steps progressively. Experiment results on two public misinformation datasets show that HiSS prompting outperforms state-of-the-art fully-supervised approach and strong few-shot ICL-enabled baselines.

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Tasks

Claim VerificationFact VerificationFake News DetectionIn-Context LearningMisinformation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Fake News Detection RAWFC HiSS F1 53.9 #2 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Fake News Detection RAWFC ReAct F1 49.8 #4 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Fake News Detection RAWFC Standard prompting with articles F1 47.9 #5 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Fake News Detection RAWFC CoT F1 44.4 #6 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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