The CheckThat! lab aims to advance the development of innovative technologies designed to identify and to counteract online disinformation and manipulation efforts across various languages and platforms. The first five editions of the CheckThat! lab focused on the main tasks of the information verification pipeline: check-worthiness, evidence retrieval and pairing, and verification. Since the 2023 edition, the lab has broadened the focus and addressed new problems on auxiliary tasks supporting research and decision-making during the verification process. In the 2025 edition of the lab, we consider tasks at the core of the verification pipeline again as well as auxiliary tasks: Task 1 is on identification of subjectivity (a follow up of the CheckThat! 2024 edition), Task 2 is on claim normalization, Task 3 addresses fact-checking numerical claims, and Task 4 focuses on scientific web discourse processing. These tasks represent challenging classification and retrieval problems at the document and at the span level, including multilingual settings.

Web search is among the most frequent online activities. In this context, widespread informational queries entail user intentions to obtain knowledge with respect to a particular topic or domain. To serve learning needs better, recent research in the field of interactive information retrieval has advocated the importance of moving beyond relevance ranking of search results and considering a user’s knowledge state within learning oriented search sessions. Prior work has investigated the use of supervised models to predict a user’s knowledge gain and knowledge state from user interactions during a search session. However, the characteristics of the resources that a user interacts with have neither been sufficiently explored, nor exploited in this task. In this work, we introduce a novel set of resource-centric features and demonstrate their capacity to significantly improve supervised models for the task of predicting knowledge gain and knowledge state of users in Web search sessions. We make important contributions, given that reliable training data for such tasks is sparse and costly to obtain. We introduce various feature selection strategies geared towards selecting a limited subset of effective and generalizable features.