Rome was built in 1776: A Case Study on Factual Correctness in Knowledge-Grounded Response Generation

By Sashank Santhanam, Behnam Hedayatnia, Spandana Gella, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Seokhwan Kim, Yang Liu, Dilek Z. Hakkani-Tür. 2021

41 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently neural response generation models have leveraged large pre-trained transformer models and knowledge snippets to generate relevant and informative responses. However, this does not guarantee that generated responses are factually correct. In this paper, we examine factual correctness in knowledge-grounded neural response generation models. We present a human annotation setup to identify three different response types: responses that are factually consistent with respect to the input knowledge, responses that contain hallucinated knowledge, and non-verifiable chitchat style responses. We use this setup to annotate responses generated using different stateof-the-art models, knowledge snippets, and decoding strategies. In addition, to facilitate the development of a factual consistency detector, we automatically create a new corpus called Conv-FEVER that is adapted from the Wizard of Wikipedia dataset and includes factually consistent and inconsistent responses. We demonstrate the benefit of our Conv-FEVER dataset by showing that the models trained on this data perform reasonably well to detect factually inconsistent responses with respect to the provided knowledge through evaluation on our human annotated data. We will release the Conv-FEVER dataset and the human annotated responses.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Natural Language Processing

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Pascale Fung
2. Andrea Madotto
3. Wenliang Dai
4. Nayeon Lee
5. Yan Xu
6. Etsuko Ishii
7. Ziwei Ji
8. Dan Su

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

1. Pascale Fung
2. Wenliang Dai
3. Ziwei Ji
4. Dan Su
5. Tiezheng Yu
6. Yejin Bang
7. Andrea Madotto
8. Etsuko Ishii

In Natural Language Processing

1. Pascale Fung
2. Nayeon Lee
3. Andrea Madotto
4. Etsuko Ishii
5. Yejin Bang
6. Yan Xu
7. Rita Frieske
8. Dan Su

Citations in the corpus

• Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation (2022, methodology): “Therefore, chatbots are usually evaluated by humans on factual consistency or factual correctness [154, 198].”
• Large Language Models: A Survey (2024, unknown): “• Faithfulness Classification Metrics : Offer a refined assessment by creating task-specific datasets for a nuanced evaluation (see [154]).”