ECON: On the Detection and Resolution of Evidence Conflicts

Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Qianqian Zhuang, Lin Qiu, Tianhang Zhang, Tengxiao Liu, Yangqiu Song, Yue Zhang, Pengfei Liu, Zheng Zhang


Abstract
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has significantly influenced the quality of information in decision-making systems, leading to the prevalence of AI-generated content and challenges in detecting misinformation and managing conflicting information, or “inter-evidence conflicts.” This study introduces a method for generating diverse, validated evidence conflicts to simulate real-world misinformation scenarios. We evaluate conflict detection methods, including Natural Language Inference (NLI) models, factual consistency (FC) models, and LLMs, on these conflicts (RQ1) and analyze LLMs’ conflict resolution behaviors (RQ2). Our key findings include: (1) NLI and LLM models exhibit high precision in detecting answer conflicts, though weaker models suffer from low recall; (2) FC models struggle with lexically similar answer conflicts, while NLI and LLM models handle these better; and (3) stronger models like GPT-4 show robust performance, especially with nuanced conflicts. For conflict resolution, LLMs often favor one piece of conflicting evidence without justification and rely on internal knowledge if they have prior beliefs.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.447
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7816–7844
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.447
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.447
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Qianqian Zhuang, Lin Qiu, Tianhang Zhang, Tengxiao Liu, Yangqiu Song, Yue Zhang, Pengfei Liu, and Zheng Zhang. 2024. ECON: On the Detection and Resolution of Evidence Conflicts. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7816–7844, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ECON: On the Detection and Resolution of Evidence Conflicts (Jiayang et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.447.pdf