DS@GT at CheckThat! 2025: Exploring Retrieval and Reranking Pipelines for Scientific Claim Source Retrieval on Social Media Discourse
This work addresses the need to verify scientific claims on social media, but it is incremental as it builds on existing retrieval and reranking methods for a specific competition task.
The paper tackled the problem of retrieving scientific papers to verify claims in social media tweets, achieving an MRR@5 of 0.58, which is a 0.15 improvement over the BM25 baseline of 0.43.
Social media users often make scientific claims without citing where these claims come from, generating a need to verify these claims. This paper details work done by the DS@GT team for CLEF 2025 CheckThat! Lab Task 4b Scientific Claim Source Retrieval which seeks to find relevant scientific papers based on implicit references in tweets. Our team explored 6 different data augmentation techniques, 7 different retrieval and reranking pipelines, and finetuned a bi-encoder. Achieving an MRR@5 of 0.58, our team ranked 16th out of 30 teams for the CLEF 2025 CheckThat! Lab Task 4b, and improvement of 0.15 over the BM25 baseline of 0.43. Our code is available on Github at https://github.com/dsgt-arc/checkthat-2025-swd/tree/main/subtask-4b.