Learning to generate and evaluate fact-checking explanations with transformers

In an era increasingly dominated by digital platforms, the spread of misinformation poses a significant challenge, highlighting the need for solutions capable of assessing information veracity. Our research contributes to the field of Explainable Artificial Antelligence (XAI) by developing transformer-based fact-checking models that contextualise and justify their decisions by generating human-accessible explanations. Importantly, we also develop models for automatic evaluation of explanations for fact-checking verdicts across different dimensions such as (self)-contradiction , hallucination , convincingness and overall quality . By introducing human-centred evaluation methods and developing specialised datasets, we emphasise the need for aligning Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated explanations with human judgements. This approach not only advances theoretical knowledge in XAI but also holds practical implications by enhancing the transparency, reliability and users’ trust in AI-driven fact-checking systems. Furthermore, the development of our metric learning models is a first step towards potentially increasing efficiency and reducing reliance on extensive manual assessment. Based on experimental results, our best performing generative model achieved a Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation-1 ( ROUGE-1 ) score of 47.77 demonstrating superior performance in generating fact-checking explanations, particularly when provided with high-quality evidence. Additionally, the best performing metric learning model showed a moderately strong correlation with human judgements on objective dimensions such as (self)-contradiction and hallucination , achieving a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of around 0.7. • A dataset for fact-checking which includes explanations written by journalists. • Transformer models for generating human-accessible fact-checking explanations. • Multi-dimensional annotations reflecting explanation quality judgements. • A metric learning model scoring explanations aligned with these judgements.