Retrieving Semantics for Fact-Checking: A Comparative Approach using CQ (Claim to Question) & AQ (Answer to Question)

Fact-checking using evidences is the preferred way to tackle the issue of misinformation in the society. The democratization of information through social media has accelerated the spread of information, allowing misinformation to reach and influence a vast audience. The significant impact of these falsehoods on society and public opinion underscores the need for automated approaches to identify and combat this phenomenon. This paper describes the participation of team IKR3-UNIMIB in AVeriTeC (Automated Verification of Textual Claims) 2024 shared task. We proposed a methods to retrieve evidence in the question and answer format and predict the veracity of a claim. As part of the AVeriTeC shared task, our method combines similarity-based ColBERT re-ranker with traditional keyword search using BM25. Additionally, a recent promising approach, Chain of RAG (CoRAG) is introduced to generate question and answer pairs (QAs) to evaluate performance on this specific dataset. We explore whether generating questions from claims or answers produces more effective QA pairs for veracity prediction. Additionally, we try to generate questions from the claim rather than from evidence (opposite the AVeriTeC dataset paper) to generate effective QA pairs for veracity prediction. Our method achieved an AVeriTeC Score of 0.18 (more than baseline) on the test dataset, demonstrating its potential in automated fact-checking.