Towards Fine-Grained Citation Evaluation in Generated Text: A Comparative Analysis of Faithfulness Metrics

Weijia Zhang, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Yifei Yuan, Jiahuan Pei, Jia-hong Huang, Evangelos Kanoulas


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) often produce unsupported or unverifiable content, known as “hallucinations.” To mitigate this, retrieval-augmented LLMs incorporate citations, grounding the content in verifiable sources. Despite such developments, manually assessing how well a citation supports the associated statement remains a major challenge. Previous studies use faithfulness metrics to estimate citation support automatically but are limited to binary classification, overlooking fine-grained citation support in practical scenarios. To investigate the effectiveness of faithfulness metrics in fine-grained scenarios, we propose a comparative evaluation framework that assesses the metric effectiveness in distinguishing citations between three-category support levels: full, partial, and no support. Our framework employs correlation analysis, classification evaluation, and retrieval evaluation to measure the alignment between metric scores and human judgments comprehensively. Our results show no single metric consistently excels across all evaluations, revealing the complexity of assessing fine-grained support. Based on the findings, we provide practical recommendations for developing more effective metrics.
Anthology ID:
2024.inlg-main.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Natural Language Generation Conference
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Tokyo, Japan
Editors:
Saad Mahamood, Nguyen Le Minh, Daphne Ippolito
Venue:
INLG
SIG:
SIGGEN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
427–439
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.inlg-main.35
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weijia Zhang, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Yifei Yuan, Jiahuan Pei, Jia-hong Huang, and Evangelos Kanoulas. 2024. Towards Fine-Grained Citation Evaluation in Generated Text: A Comparative Analysis of Faithfulness Metrics. In Proceedings of the 17th International Natural Language Generation Conference, pages 427–439, Tokyo, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Fine-Grained Citation Evaluation in Generated Text: A Comparative Analysis of Faithfulness Metrics (Zhang et al., INLG 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.inlg-main.35.pdf