Paper Detail

To Trust or Not to Trust: Retrieval-Augmented Fact Checking in Speech

Debajyoti Mazumder, Mamta, Abhirama Subramanyam Penamakuri

arxiv Score 16.2

Published 2026-09-24 · First seen 2026-09-26

General AI

Abstract

Online misinformation increasingly appears in spoken formats such as news clips, podcasts, interviews, political speeches, and social media videos, creating a need for fact-checking systems that can verify claims directly from speech. We introduce VeriSpeak, a probe benchmark for studying speech-based fact verification in Large Audio Language Models (LALMs). VeriSpeak contains 3,879 spoken claims spanning temporal, geographical, and relational facts, with balanced true and false labels. The benchmark is designed to examine whether factual verification ability transfers from text to speech, and whether retrieval-augmented LALMs can use textual evidence to correctly support or refute spoken claims. Our experiments reveal a consistent text-speech modality gap: LALMs that verify written claims reliably often fail on the same claims when spoken. Moreover, retrieval alone provides limited gains because models frequently conflate retrieved evidence with the spoken claim. In contrast, retrieval combined with explicit reasoning improves claim-evidence comparison, with a thinking-tuned LALM reaching 86.1% accuracy. VeriSpeak highlights that effective speech misinformation detection requires not only speech understanding, but also grounded reasoning over retrieved evidence. The dataset is publicly available via Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/abhiram4572/VeriSpeak.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
now
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{mazumder2026trust,
  title = {To Trust or Not to Trust: Retrieval-Augmented Fact Checking in Speech},
  author = {Debajyoti Mazumder and Mamta and Abhirama Subramanyam Penamakuri},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Online misinformation increasingly appears in spoken formats such as news clips, podcasts, interviews, political speeches, and social media videos, creating a need for fact-checking systems that can verify claims directly from speech. We introduce VeriSpeak, a probe benchmark for studying speech-based fact verification in Large Audio Language Models (LALMs). VeriSpeak contains 3,879 spoken claims spanning temporal, geographical, and relational facts, with balanced true and false labels. The benc},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30227},
  keywords = {cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.SD},
  eprint = {2609.30227},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}