DYNAMICQA: Tracing Internal Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models

Sara Vera Marjanovic, Haeun Yu, Pepa Atanasova, Maria Maistro, Christina Lioma, Isabelle Augenstein


Abstract
Knowledge-intensive language understanding tasks require Language Models (LMs) to integrate relevant context, mitigating their inherent weaknesses, such as incomplete or outdated knowledge. However, conflicting knowledge can be present in the LM’s parameters, termed intra-memory conflict, which can affect a model’s propensity to accept contextual knowledge. To study the effect of intra-memory conflict on LM’s ability to accept the relevant context, we utilise two knowledge conflict measures and a novel dataset containing inherently conflicting data, DYNAMICQA. This dataset includes facts with a temporal dynamic nature where facts can change over time and disputable dynamic facts, which can change depending on the viewpoint. DYNAMICQA is the first to include real-world knowledge conflicts and provide context to study the link between the different types of knowledge conflicts. We also evaluate several measures on their ability to reflect the presence of intra-memory conflict: semantic entropy and a novel coherent persuasion score. With our extensive experiments, we verify that LMs show a greater degree of intra-memory conflict with dynamic facts compared to facts that have a single truth value. Further, we reveal that facts with intra-memory conflict are harder to update with context, suggesting that retrieval-augmented generation will struggle with the most commonly adapted facts
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.838
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:
14346–14360
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.838/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.838
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sara Vera Marjanovic, Haeun Yu, Pepa Atanasova, Maria Maistro, Christina Lioma, and Isabelle Augenstein. 2024. DYNAMICQA: Tracing Internal Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 14346–14360, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DYNAMICQA: Tracing Internal Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models (Marjanovic et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.838.pdf