We address claim normalization for multilingual misinformation detection - transforming noisy social media posts into clear, verifiable statements across 20 languages. The key contribution demonstrates how systematic decomposition of posts using Who, What, Where, When, Why and How questions enables robust cross-lingual transfer despite training exclusively on English data. Our methodology incorporates finetuning Qwen3-14B using LoRA with the provided dataset after intra-post deduplication, token-level recall filtering for semantic alignment and retrieval-augmented few-shot learning with contextual examples during inference. Our system achieves METEOR scores ranging from 41.16 (English) to 15.21 (Marathi), securing third rank on the English leaderboard and fourth rank for Dutch and Punjabi. The approach shows 41.3% relative improvement in METEOR over baseline configurations and substantial gains over existing methods. Results demonstrate effective cross-lingual generalization for Romance and Germanic languages while maintaining semantic coherence across diverse linguistic structures.

Claim normalization is an integral part of any automatic fact-check verification system. It parses the typically noisy claim data, such as social media posts into normalized claims, which are then fed into downstream veracity classification tasks. The CheckThat! 2025 Task 2 focuses specifically on claim normalization and spans 20 languages under monolingual and zero-shot conditions. Our proposed solution consists of a lightweight \emph{retrieval-first, LLM-backed} pipeline, in which we either dynamically prompt a GPT-4o-mini with in-context examples, or retrieve the closest normalization from the train dataset directly. On the official test set, the system ranks near the top for most monolingual tracks, achieving first place in 7 out of of the 13 languages. In contrast, the system underperforms in the zero-shot setting, highlighting the limitation of the proposed solution.

With the rise of social media, users are exposed to many misleading claims. However, the pervasive noise inherent in these posts presents a challenge in identifying precise and prominent claims that require verification. Extracting the important claims from such posts is arduous and time-consuming, yet it is an underexplored problem. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. We introduce a novel task, Claim Normalization (aka ClaimNorm), which aims to decompose complex and noisy social media posts into more straightforward and understandable forms, termed normalized claims. We propose CACN, a pioneering approach that leverages chain-of-thought and claim check-worthiness estimation, mimicking human reasoning processes, to comprehend intricate claims. Moreover, we capitalize on the in-context learning capabilities of large language models to provide guidance and to improve claim normalization. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we meticulously compile a comprehensive real-world dataset, CLAN, comprising more than 6k instances of social media posts alongside their respective normalized claims. Our experiments demonstrate that CACN outperforms several baselines across various evaluation measures. Finally, our rigorous error analysis validates CACN's capabilities and pitfalls.

Claim span identification (CSI) is an important step in fact-checking pipelines, aiming to identify text segments that contain a checkworthy claim or assertion in a social media post. Despite its importance to journalists and human fact-checkers, it remains a severely understudied problem, and the scarce research on this topic so far has only focused on English. Here we aim to bridge this gap by creating a novel dataset, X-CLAIM, consisting of 7K real-world claims collected from numerous social media platforms in five Indian languages and English. We report strong baselines with state-of-the-art encoder-only language models (e.g., XLM-R) and we demonstrate the benefits of training on multiple languages over alternative cross-lingual transfer methods such as zero-shot transfer, or training on translated data, from a high-resource language such as English. We evaluate generative large language models from the GPT series using prompting methods on the X-CLAIM dataset and we find that they underperform the smaller encoder-only language models for low-resource languages.