Unsupervised Thematic Context Discovery for Explainable AI in Fact Verification: Advancing the CARAG Framework

This paper introduces CARAG-u, an unsupervised extension of the Context-Aware Retrieval Augmented Generation (CARAG) framework, designed to advance explainability in Automated Fact Verification (AFV) architectures. Unlike its predecessor, CARAG-u eliminates reliance on predefined thematic annotations and claim-evidence pair labels, by dynamically deriving thematic clusters and evidence pools from unstructured datasets. This innovation enables CARAG-u to balance local and global perspectives in evidence retrieval and explanation generation. We benchmark CARAG-u against Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and compare it with CARAG, highlighting its unsupervised adaptability while maintaining a competitive performance. Evaluations on the FactVer dataset demonstrate CARAG-u's ability to generate thematically coherent and context-sensitive post-hoc explanations, advancing Explainable AI in AFV. The implementation of CARAGu, including all dependencies, is publicly available to ensure reproducibility and support further research.