“Knowing When You Don’t Know”: A Multilingual Relevance Assessment Dataset for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Nandan Thakur, Luiz Bonifacio, Crystina Zhang, Odunayo Ogundepo, Ehsan Kamalloo, David Alfonso-Hermelo, Xiaoguang Li, Qun Liu, Boxing Chen, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Jimmy Lin


Abstract
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds Large Language Model (LLM) output by leveraging external knowledge sources to reduce factual hallucinations. However, prior work lacks a comprehensive evaluation of different language families, making it challenging to evaluate LLM robustness against errors in external retrieved knowledge. To overcome this, we establish **NoMIRACL**, a human-annotated dataset for evaluating LLM robustness in RAG across 18 typologically diverse languages. NoMIRACL includes both a non-relevant and a relevant subset. Queries in the non-relevant subset contain passages judged as non-relevant, whereas queries in the relevant subset include at least a single judged relevant passage. We measure relevance assessment using: (i) *hallucination rate*, measuring model tendency to hallucinate when the answer is not present in passages in the non-relevant subset, and (ii) *error rate*, measuring model inaccuracy to recognize relevant passages in the relevant subset. In our work, we observe that most models struggle to balance the two capacities. Models such as LLAMA-2 and Orca-2 achieve over 88% hallucination rate on the non-relevant subset. Mistral and LLAMA-3 hallucinate less but can achieve up to a 74.9% error rate on the relevant subset. Overall, GPT-4 is observed to provide the best tradeoff on both subsets, highlighting future work necessary to improve LLM robustness. NoMIRACL dataset and evaluation code are available at: https://github.com/project-miracl/nomiracl.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.730
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
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
12508–12526
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.730
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Cite (ACL):
Nandan Thakur, Luiz Bonifacio, Crystina Zhang, Odunayo Ogundepo, Ehsan Kamalloo, David Alfonso-Hermelo, Xiaoguang Li, Qun Liu, Boxing Chen, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, and Jimmy Lin. 2024. “Knowing When You Don’t Know”: A Multilingual Relevance Assessment Dataset for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12508–12526, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“Knowing When You Don’t Know”: A Multilingual Relevance Assessment Dataset for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Thakur et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.730.pdf
Software:
 2024.findings-emnlp.730.software.zip
Data:
 2024.findings-emnlp.730.data.zip