Abstract Summary
The main objective of the CheckThat! lab is to advance the development of innovative technologies combating disinformation and manipulation efforts in online communication across a multitude of languages and platforms. Focusing on core tasks of the verification pipeline in earlier years, namely check-worthiness, evidence retrieval, and verification, the CheckThat! lab broadened its focus during the past three editions and included auxiliary challenges linked to the verification process. In the 2026 edition of the lab, the verification pipeline is placed at the center again, further expanding the core tasks of the pipeline: Task 1 is on source retrieval for scientific web claims (a follow-up of the CheckThat! 2025 edition), Task 2 focuses on fact-checking numerical and temporal claims, adding a reasoning component to the 2025 edition of the task, and Task 3 expands the verification pipeline by a task on the generation of full-fact-checking articles. These tasks represent challeng ing classification and retrieval problems as well as generation challenges at the document and at the span level, including multilingual settings.
