FactGenius: Combining Zero-Shot Prompting and Fuzzy Relation Mining to Improve Fact Verification with Knowledge Graphs

Abstract

Fact-checking is a crucial natural language processing (NLP) task that verifies the truthfulness of claims by considering reliable evidence. Traditional methods are often limited by labour-intensive data curation and rule-based approaches. In this paper, we present FactGenius, a novel method that enhances fact-checking by combining zero-shot prompting of large language models (LLMs) with fuzzy text matching on knowledge graphs (KGs). Leveraging DBpedia, a structured linked data dataset derived from Wikipedia, FactGenius refines LLM-generated connections using similarity measures to ensure accuracy. The evaluation of FactGenius on the FactKG, a benchmark dataset for fact verification, demonstrates that it significantly outperforms existing baselines, particularly when fine-tuning RoBERTa as a classifier. The two-stage approach of filtering and validating connections proves crucial, achieving superior performance across various reasoning types and establishing FactGenius as a promising tool for robust fact-checking. The code and materials are available at https://github.com/SushantGautam/FactGenius.