Yicheng Fan


2023

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RARR: Researching and Revising What Language Models Say, Using Language Models
Luyu Gao | Zhuyun Dai | Panupong Pasupat | Anthony Chen | Arun Tejasvi Chaganty | Yicheng Fan | Vincent Zhao | Ni Lao | Hongrae Lee | Da-Cheng Juan | Kelvin Guu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Language models (LMs) now excel at many tasks such as question answering, reasoning, and dialog. However, they sometimes generate unsupported or misleading content. A user cannot easily determine whether their outputs are trustworthy or not, because most LMs do not have any built-in mechanism for attribution to external evidence. To enable attribution while still preserving all the powerful advantages of recent generation models, we propose RARR (Retrofit Attribution using Research and Revision), a system that 1) automatically finds attribution for the output of any text generation model, and 2) post-edits the output to fix unsupported content while preserving the original output as much as possible. When applied to the output of several state-of-the-art LMs on a diverse set of generation tasks, we find that RARR significantly improves attribution while otherwise preserving the original input to a much greater degree than previously explored edit models. Furthermore, the implementation of RARR requires only a handful of training examples, a large language model, and standard web search.