DelucionQA: Detecting Hallucinations in Domain-specific Question Answering

Mobashir Sadat, Zhengyu Zhou, Lukas Lange, Jun Araki, Arsalan Gundroo, Bingqing Wang, Rakesh Menon, Md Parvez, Zhe Feng


Abstract
Hallucination is a well-known phenomenon in text generated by large language models (LLMs). The existence of hallucinatory responses is found in almost all application scenarios e.g., summarization, question-answering (QA) etc. For applications requiring high reliability (e.g., customer-facing assistants), the potential existence of hallucination in LLM-generated text is a critical problem. The amount of hallucination can be reduced by leveraging information retrieval to provide relevant background information to the LLM. However, LLMs can still generate hallucinatory content for various reasons (e.g., prioritizing its parametric knowledge over the context, failure to capture the relevant information from the context, etc.). Detecting hallucinations through automated methods is thus paramount. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce a sophisticated dataset, DelucionQA, that captures hallucinations made by retrieval-augmented LLMs for a domain-specific QA task. Furthermore, we propose a set of hallucination detection methods to serve as baselines for future works from the research community. Analysis and case study are also provided to share valuable insights on hallucination phenomena in the target scenario.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.59
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
822–835
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.59
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.59
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mobashir Sadat, Zhengyu Zhou, Lukas Lange, Jun Araki, Arsalan Gundroo, Bingqing Wang, Rakesh Menon, Md Parvez, and Zhe Feng. 2023. DelucionQA: Detecting Hallucinations in Domain-specific Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 822–835, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DelucionQA: Detecting Hallucinations in Domain-specific Question Answering (Sadat et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.59.pdf