Hermit Kingdom Through the Lens of Multiple Perspectives: A Case Study of LLM Hallucination on North Korea

Eunjung Cho, Won Ik Cho, Soomin Seo


Abstract
Hallucination in large language models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge for their safe deployment, particularly due to its potential to spread misinformation. Most existing solutions address this challenge by focusing on aligning the models with credible sources or by improving how models communicate their confidence (or lack thereof) in their outputs. While these measures may be effective in most contexts, they may fall short in scenarios requiring more nuanced approaches, especially in situations where access to accurate data is limited or determining credible sources is challenging. In this study, we take North Korea - a country characterised by an extreme lack of reliable sources and the prevalence of sensationalist falsehoods - as a case study. We explore and evaluate how some of the best-performing multilingual LLMs and specific language-based models generate information about North Korea in three languages spoken in countries with significant geo-political interests: English (United States, United Kingdom), Korean (South Korea), and Mandarin Chinese (China). Our findings reveal significant differences, suggesting that the choice of model and language can lead to vastly different understandings of North Korea, which has important implications given the global security challenges the country poses.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.226
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3353–3371
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.226/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eunjung Cho, Won Ik Cho, and Soomin Seo. 2025. Hermit Kingdom Through the Lens of Multiple Perspectives: A Case Study of LLM Hallucination on North Korea. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3353–3371, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hermit Kingdom Through the Lens of Multiple Perspectives: A Case Study of LLM Hallucination on North Korea (Cho et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.226.pdf