{"ID":2867972,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01226","arxiv_id":"2510.01226","title":"ClaimCheck: Real-Time Fact-Checking with Small Language Models","abstract":"We introduce ClaimCheck, an LLM-guided automatic fact-checking system designed to verify real-world claims using live Web evidence and small language models. Unlike prior systems that rely on large, closed-source models and static knowledge stores, ClaimCheck employs a transparent, stepwise verification pipeline that mirrors human fact-checking workflows consisting of Web search query planning, Web-based evidence retrieval and summarization, evidence synthesis and re-retrieval, and claim verdict evaluation. Each module is optimized for small LLMs, allowing the system to deliver accurate and interpretable fact-checking with significantly lower computational requirements. Despite using a much smaller Qwen3-4B model, ClaimCheck achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 76.4% on the AVeriTeC dataset, outperforming previous approaches using LLaMA3.1 70B and GPT-4o. Extensive ablations demonstrate that careful modular design and prompting strategies can overcome the limitations of smaller LLMs. To promote accessibility and transparency, we provide a public demo at https://idir.uta.edu/claimcheck.","short_abstract":"We introduce ClaimCheck, an LLM-guided automatic fact-checking system designed to verify real-world claims using live Web evidence and small language models. Unlike prior systems that rely on large, closed-source models and static knowledge stores, ClaimCheck employs a transparent, stepwise verification pipeline that m...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01226","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01226v1","authors":"[\"Akshith Reddy Putta\",\"Jacob Devasier\",\"Chengkai Li\"]","published":"2025-09-22T21:18:08Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","project_urls":"[\"https://idir.uta.edu/claimcheck\"]","has_code":false}