AKCIT-FN at CheckThat! 2025: Switching Fine-Tuned SLMs and LLM Prompting for Multilingual Claim Normalization

Claim normalization, the transformation of informal social media posts into concise, self-contained statements, is a crucial step in automated fact-checking pipelines. This paper details our submission to the CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Task~2, which challenges systems to perform claim normalization across twenty languages, divided into thirteen supervised (high-resource) and seven zero-shot (no training data) tracks. Our approach, leveraging fine-tuned Small Language Models (SLMs) for supervised languages and Large Language Model (LLM) prompting for zero-shot scenarios, achieved podium positions (top three) in fifteen of the twenty languages. Notably, this included second-place rankings in eight languages, five of which were among the seven designated zero-shot languages, underscoring the effectiveness of our LLM-based zero-shot strategy. For Portuguese, our initial development language, our system achieved an average METEOR score of 0.5290, ranking third. All implementation artifacts, including inference, training, evaluation scripts, and prompt configurations, are publicly available at https://github.com/ju-resplande/checkthat2025_normalization.