FACT5: A Novel Benchmark and Pipeline for Nuanced Fact-Checking of Complex Statements

Fact-checking complex statements is integral to combating misinformation, but manual approaches are time-consuming, while automated approaches often oversimplify truthfulness into binary classifications and rely on resourceintensive models.This paper introduces: (i) FACT5, a curated dataset of 150 real-world statements with five ordinal classes of truthfulness, designed to capture the nuanced nature of factual accuracy and (ii) an opensource end-to-end pipeline using large language models (LLMs) that decomposes statements into atomic claims, generates targeted questions, retrieves evidence from the web, and produces justified verdicts.We evaluate our pipeline on FACT5 using MISTRAL-7B-V0.3 and Google's GEMINI-1.5-FLASH.Our findings demonstrate significant improvements over baseline LLM performance, with MISTRAL-7B showing a 71.9% reduction in MSE for pass@3 evaluation.The FACT5 dataset, pipeline implementation, and evaluation framework are anonymized and provided at https://github.com/shayantist/FACT5/,and a demo of the pipeline can be interacted with at https://fact5check.streamlit.a pp/.