VeriScore: Evaluating the factuality of verifiable claims in long-form text generation

Yixiao Song, Yekyung Kim, Mohit Iyyer


Abstract
Existing metrics for evaluating the factuality of long-form text, such as FACTSCORE (Min et al., 2023) and SAFE (Wei et al., 2024), decompose an input text into “atomic claims” and verify each against a knowledge base like Wikipedia. These metrics are not suitable for most generation tasks because they assume that every claim is verifiable (i.e., can plausibly be proven true or false). We address this issue with VERISCORE,1 a metric for evaluating factuality in diverse long-form generation tasks that contain both verifiable and unverifiable content. VERISCORE can be effectively implemented with either closed or fine-tuned open-weight language models. Human evaluation confirms that VERISCORE’s extracted claims are more sensible than those from competing methods across eight different long-form tasks. We use VERISCORE to evaluate generations from 16 different models across multiple long-form tasks and find that while GPT-4o is the best-performing model overall, open-weight models such as Mixtral-8×22 are closing the gap. We show that an LM’s VERISCORE on one task (e.g., biography generation) does not necessarily correlate to its VERISCORE on a different task (e.g., long-form QA), highlighting the need for expanding factuality evaluation across tasks with varying fact density.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.552
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9447–9474
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.552/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.552
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yixiao Song, Yekyung Kim, and Mohit Iyyer. 2024. VeriScore: Evaluating the factuality of verifiable claims in long-form text generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 9447–9474, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VeriScore: Evaluating the factuality of verifiable claims in long-form text generation (Song et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.552.pdf
Software:
 2024.findings-emnlp.552.software.zip