  Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have drawn significant attention due
to their outstanding reasoning capabilities and extensive knowledge repository,
positioning them as superior in handling various natural language processing
tasks compared to other language models. In this paper, we present a
preliminary investigation into the potential of LLMs in fact-checking. This
study aims to comprehensively evaluate various LLMs in tackling specific
fact-checking subtasks, systematically evaluating their capabilities, and
conducting a comparative analysis of their performance against pre-trained and
state-of-the-art low-parameter models. Experiments demonstrate that LLMs
achieve competitive performance compared to other small models in most
scenarios. However, they encounter challenges in effectively handling Chinese
fact verification and the entirety of the fact-checking pipeline due to
language inconsistencies and hallucinations. These findings underscore the need
for further exploration and research to enhance the proficiency of LLMs as
reliable fact-checkers, unveiling the potential capability of LLMs and the
possible challenges in fact-checking tasks.

Computation and Language