Alamgir Munir Qazi¹   John P. McCrae²   Jamal Abdul Nasir¹

¹School of Computer Science, University of Galway, Ireland
²Research Ireland Insight Centre and ADAPT Centre, University of Galway, Ireland

The proliferation of misinformation necessitates robust yet computationally efficient fact verification systems. While current state-of-the-art approaches leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating explanatory rationales, these methods face significant computational barriers and hallucination risks in real-world deployments. We present DeReC (Dense Retrieval Classification), a lightweight framework that demonstrates how general-purpose text embeddings can effectively replace autoregressive LLM-based approaches in fact verification tasks. By combining dense retrieval with specialized classification, our system achieves better accuracy while being significantly more efficient. DeReC outperforms explanation-generating LLMs in efficiency, reducing runtime by 95% on RAWFC (23 minutes 36 seconds vs. 454 minutes 12 seconds) and by 92% on LIAR-RAW (134 minutes 14 seconds vs. 1692 minutes 23 seconds), showcasing its effectiveness across varying dataset sizes. On the RAWFC dataset, DeReC achieves an F1 score of 65.58%, surpassing state of the art method L-Defense (61.20%). Our results demonstrate that carefully engineered retrieval-based systems can match or exceed LLM performance in specialized tasks while being significantly more practical for real-world deployment.