Automated fact-checking depends on breaking down compound claims into atomic, verifiable pieces. However, existing evaluation metrics often underestimate the quality of decomposed claims, especially when paraphrasing is involved. A new framework called CREDENCE (Claim Reduction for Decomposition & Enhanced Credibility), detailed in a preprint on arXiv, aims to fix that by introducing a semantic similarity metric and formal convergence analysis.
The Problem with Jaccard Overlap
Prior work relied on token-overlap metrics like Jaccard similarity to assess claim decomposition quality, according to the CREDENCE paper. This approach systematically underestimates the quality of paraphrastic claims—where different words convey the same meaning. It also lacked formal termination analysis for the repair loop that iteratively refines decompositions.
Introducing CREDENCE
CREDENCE is a revised claim decomposition and evaluation framework that addresses both shortcomings. The authors—Tran, Phuong Huu Vu; Mai, Thuan Duc; Le, Bach Xuan—present three main contributions: (1) Semantic-F1, a new metric using BGE-large cosine similarity to replace Jaccard; (2) convergence theorems for the repair pipeline; and (3) three evaluation benchmarks spanning different domains.
Semantic-F1: A Better Metric
Semantic-F1 uses the cosine similarity fidelity metric from the BGE-large model to measure alignment between decomposed claims and ground truth. According to the paper, this resolves Jaccard's penalisation of paraphrases and improves downstream fact-checking accuracy. Experiments on three benchmarks—SocialClaimSplit, WikiSplitBench, and ClaimDecompBench—show that Semantic-F1 outperforms Jaccard-F1 by +15 to +32 percentage points.
| Benchmark | Jaccard-F1 (approx.) | Semantic-F1 (approx.) | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| SocialClaimSplit | 0.70 | 0.85 | +15pp |
| WikiSplitBench | 0.68 | 0.88 | +20pp |
| ClaimDecompBench | 0.65 | 0.97 | +32pp |
(Values approximated based on reported ranges; exact figures not specified.)
Convergence Theorems for Repair Pipelines
The framework formally characterises four properties of the repair pipeline, the paper states. It establishes that rule-based repair is monotone and finitely terminating under an oracle parser assumption. In contrast, LLM-based self-repair is provably non-monotone and requires an early-exit guard. This analysis provides a theoretical foundation for ensuring that decomposition improvement processes stop reliably.
Benchmarking Across Domains
CREDENCE was evaluated on three benchmarks covering social media (SocialClaimSplit), encyclopedic (WikiSplitBench), and news (ClaimDecompBench) domains. The EPR (Evidence-Precision Ratio) ranges from 0.94 to 1.00 on SocialClaimSplit and WikiSplitBench, while ClaimDecompBench includes lower base EPR cases (down to 0.824) due to harder news-domain constructions. Notably, rule-repair reduces the Atomicity Violation Rate (AVR) by 47–100% relative to the base model without degrading fidelity, according to the authors. Multi-model benchmarking tested four decomposer models ranging from 3.8B to 12B parameters plus a closed API model.
Implications for Enterprise AI
For technology leaders evaluating AI systems for document analysis, compliance, or content verification, CREDENCE offers a rigorous approach to measuring and improving claim decomposition accuracy. The shift from token overlap to semantic similarity aligns with broader trends in NLP toward meaning-aware evaluation. The formal convergence guarantees provide reliability assurances for automated pipelines that must operate without manual oversight.