In an era characterized by the rapid proliferation of information, the pervasive issues of misinformation and disinformation have significantly impacted numerous individuals. Consequently, the evaluation of information’s truthfulness and accuracy has garnered substantial attention among researchers. In this work, we present a novel fact-checking framework called PACAR, fact-checking based on planning and customized action reasoning using LLMs. It comprises four modules: a claim decomposer with self-reflection, an LLM-centric planner module, an executor for carrying out planned actions, and a verifier module that assesses veracity and generates explanations based on the overall reasoning process. Unlike previous work that employs single-path decision-making and single-step verdict prediction, PACAR focuses on the use of LLMs in dynamic planning and execution of actions. Furthermore, in contrast to previous work that relied primarily on general reasoning, we introduce tailored actions such as numerical reasoning and entity disambiguation to effectively address potential challenges in fact-checking. Our PACAR framework, incorporating LLM-centric planning along with customized action reasoning, significantly outperforms baseline methods across three datasets from different domains and with varying complexity levels. Additional experiments, including multidimensional and sliced observations, demonstrate the effectiveness of PACAR and offer valuable insights for the advancement of automated fact-checking.

This study focuses on media bias detection, crucial in today’s era of influential social media platforms shaping individual attitudes and opinions. In contrast to prior work that primarily relies on training specific models tailored to particular datasets, resulting in limited adaptability and subpar performance on out-of-domain data, we introduce a general bias detection framework, IndiVec, built upon large language models. IndiVec begins by constructing a fine-grained media bias database, leveraging the robust instruction-following capabilities of large language models and vector database techniques. When confronted with new input for bias detection, our framework automatically selects the most relevant indicator from the vector database and employs majority voting to determine the input’s bias label. IndiVec excels compared to previous methods due to its adaptability (demonstrating consistent performance across diverse datasets from various sources) and explainability (providing explicit top-k indicators to interpret bias predictions). Experimental results on four political bias datasets highlight IndiVec’s significant superiority over baselines. Furthermore, additional experiments and analysis provide profound insights into the framework’s effectiveness.

Few-shot relation classification aims to classify the relation type between two given entities in a sentence by training with a few labeled instances for each relation. However, most of existing models fail to distinguish multiple relations that co-exist in one sentence. This paper presents a novel dependency-aware prototype learning (DAPL) method for few-shot relation classification. Concretely, we utilize dependency trees and shortest dependency paths (SDP) as structural information to complement the contextualized representations of input sentences by using the dependency-aware embedding as attention inputs to learn attentive sentence representations. In addition, we introduce a gate controlled update mechanism to update the dependency-aware representations according to the output of each network layer. Extensive experiments on the FewRel dataset show that DAPL achieves substantially better performance than strong baselines. For reproducibility, we will release our code and data upon the publication of this paper at https://github.com/publicstaticvo/DAPL.