AIRwaves at CheckThat! 2025: Retrieving Scientific Sources for Implicit Claims on Social Media with Dual Encoders and Neural Re-Ranking

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Main Authors: Ashbaugh, Cem, Baumgärtner, Leon, Gress, Tim, Sidorov, Nikita, Werner, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ashbaugh, Cem
Baumgärtner, Leon
Gress, Tim
Sidorov, Nikita
Werner, Daniel
author_facet Ashbaugh, Cem
Baumgärtner, Leon
Gress, Tim
Sidorov, Nikita
Werner, Daniel
contents Linking implicit scientific claims made on social media to their original publications is crucial for evidence-based fact-checking and scholarly discourse, yet it is hindered by lexical sparsity, very short queries, and domain-specific language. Team AIRwaves ranked second in Subtask 4b of the CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Lab with an evidence-retrieval approach that markedly outperforms the competition baseline. The optimized sparse-retrieval baseline(BM25) achieves MRR@5 = 0.5025 on the gold label blind test set. To surpass this baseline, a two-stage retrieval pipeline is introduced: (i) a first stage that uses a dual encoder based on E5-large, fine-tuned using in-batch and mined hard negatives and enhanced through chunked tokenization and rich document metadata; and (ii) a neural re-ranking stage using a SciBERT cross-encoder. Replacing purely lexical matching with neural representations lifts performance to MRR@5 = 0.6174, and the complete pipeline further improves to MRR@5 = 0.6828. The findings demonstrate that coupling dense retrieval with neural re-rankers delivers a powerful and efficient solution for tweet-to-study matching and provides a practical blueprint for future evidence-retrieval pipelines.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_19509
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AIRwaves at CheckThat! 2025: Retrieving Scientific Sources for Implicit Claims on Social Media with Dual Encoders and Neural Re-Ranking
Ashbaugh, Cem
Baumgärtner, Leon
Gress, Tim
Sidorov, Nikita
Werner, Daniel
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Linking implicit scientific claims made on social media to their original publications is crucial for evidence-based fact-checking and scholarly discourse, yet it is hindered by lexical sparsity, very short queries, and domain-specific language. Team AIRwaves ranked second in Subtask 4b of the CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Lab with an evidence-retrieval approach that markedly outperforms the competition baseline. The optimized sparse-retrieval baseline(BM25) achieves MRR@5 = 0.5025 on the gold label blind test set. To surpass this baseline, a two-stage retrieval pipeline is introduced: (i) a first stage that uses a dual encoder based on E5-large, fine-tuned using in-batch and mined hard negatives and enhanced through chunked tokenization and rich document metadata; and (ii) a neural re-ranking stage using a SciBERT cross-encoder. Replacing purely lexical matching with neural representations lifts performance to MRR@5 = 0.6174, and the complete pipeline further improves to MRR@5 = 0.6828. The findings demonstrate that coupling dense retrieval with neural re-rankers delivers a powerful and efficient solution for tweet-to-study matching and provides a practical blueprint for future evidence-retrieval pipelines.
title AIRwaves at CheckThat! 2025: Retrieving Scientific Sources for Implicit Claims on Social Media with Dual Encoders and Neural Re-Ranking
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19509