{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,10]],"date-time":"2025-10-10T01:30:00Z","timestamp":1760059800383,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":41,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"7","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2025,7,11]],"date-time":"2025-07-11T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1752192000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"University of Catania","award":["MUR IR0000008"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["MUR IR0000008"]}]},{"name":"European Union-NextGenerationEU","award":["MUR IR0000008"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["MUR IR0000008"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Information"],"abstract":"<jats:p>The paper introduces EVOCA\u2014Explainable Verification Of Claims by Graph Alignment\u2014a hybrid approach that combines NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques with the structural advantages of knowledge graphs to manage and reduce the amount of evidence required to evaluate statements. The approach leverages the explicit and interpretable structure of semantic graphs, which naturally represent the semantic structure of a sentence\u2014or a set of sentences\u2014and explicitly encodes the relationships among different concepts, thereby facilitating the extraction and manipulation of relevant information. The primary objective of the proposed tool is to condense the evidence into a short sentence that preserves only the salient and relevant information of the target claim. This process eliminates superfluous and redundant information, which could impact the performance of the subsequent verification task and provide useful information to explain the outcome. To achieve this, the proposed tool called EVOCA\u2014Explainable Verification Of Claims by Graph Alignment\u2014generates a sub-graph in AMR (Abstract Meaning Representation), representing the tokens of the claim\u2013evidence pair that exhibit high semantic similarity. The structured representation offered by the AMR graph not only aids in identifying the most relevant information but also improves the interpretability of the results. The resulting sub-graph is converted back into natural language with the SPRING AMR tool, producing a concise but meaning-rich \u201csub-evidence\u201d sentence. The output can be processed by lightweight language models to determine whether the evidence supports, contradicts, or is neutral about the claim. The approach is tested on the 4297 sentence pairs of the Climate-BERT-fact-checking dataset, and the promising results are discussed.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/info16070597","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,7,14]],"date-time":"2025-07-14T10:55:41Z","timestamp":1752490541000},"page":"597","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["EVOCA: Explainable Verification of Claims by Graph Alignment"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"16","author":[{"given":"Carmela","family":"De Felice","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Universit\u00e0 di Catania, Viale Andrea Doria 6, 95125 Catania, Italy"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocab":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Carmelo Fabio","family":"Longo","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione (ISTC), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Via Paolo Gaifami 18, 95126 Catania, Italy"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocab":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Misael","family":"Mongiov\u00ec","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Universit\u00e0 di Catania, Viale Andrea Doria 6, 95125 Catania, Italy"},{"name":"Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione (ISTC), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Via Paolo Gaifami 18, 95126 Catania, Italy"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocab":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-4273-6521","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Daniele Francesco","family":"Santamaria","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Universit\u00e0 di Catania, Viale Andrea Doria 6, 95125 Catania, Italy"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocab":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0008-3298-7168","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Giusy Giulia","family":"Tuccari","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Universit\u00e0 di Catania, Viale Andrea Doria 6, 95125 Catania, Italy"},{"name":"Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione (ISTC), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Via Paolo Gaifami 18, 95126 Catania, Italy"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocab":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,7,11]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Muharram, A.P., and Purwarianti, A. 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