BiDeV: Bilateral Defusing Verification for Complex Claim Fact-Checking

Complex claim fact-checking performs a crucial role in disinformation detection. Moreover, evidence redundancy, where nonessential information complicates the verification process, remains a significant issue. To tackle these limitations, we propose Bilateral De fusing V erification ( BiDeV), a novel fact-checking working-flow framework integrating multiple role-played LLMs to mimic the human-expert fact-checking process. BiDeV consists of two main modules: V agueness Defusing identifies latent information and resolves complex relations to simplify the claim, and Redundancy Defusing eliminates redundant content to enhance the evidence quality. Extensive experimental results on two widely used challenging fact-checking benchmarks (Hover and Feverous-s) demonstrate that our BiDeV can achieve the best performance under both gold and open settings. This highlights the effectiveness of BiDeV in handling complex claims and ensuring precise fact-checking 1 . Introduction Fact-checking is crucial for claim verification by collecting relevant evidence and determining their veracity (Guo, Schlichtkrull, and Vlachos 2022).