Turkish Multimodal Video Fact-Checking: A New Dataset and a Comparison of Zero-Shot Agentic and Fine-Tuned Systems

Azra Açıl

Video-based misinformation spreads rapidly on social media, but almost all existing fact-checking systems focus exclusively on English text. Tools for low-resource languages such as Turkish are severely limited. In this work, we present TeViD (Turkish Video Fact-checking Dataset), to the best of our knowledge the first multimodal video fact-checking dataset for Turkish. We compiled the dataset from articles published by Teyit.org, an IFCN-certified organisation, and enriched it with translated Snopes articles and synthetic examples to reduce class imbalance. Building on TeViD, we develop two verification pipelines that share the same open-source base model. First, in 3MFact-TR (Pipeline 1), we adapt the multi-role 3MFact framework to Turkish with the Qwen2.5-7B large language model and the Qwen2-VL-7B vision-language model, and add three modules of our own: a semantic inconsistency checker, a 5W1H question manager, and a bilingual evidence retriever that excludes fact-checking sites to prevent leakage. Second, as our Fine-Tuned Model (Pipeline 2), we fine-tune a single Qwen2.5-7B with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to produce closed-book verdicts from the claim and the video's…