The DOI matches its Crossref record; 41 of the 41 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization
Open accessAbstract
Currently used metrics for assessing summarization algorithms do not account for whether summaries are factually consistent with source documents.We propose a weakly-supervised, model-based approach for verifying factual consistency and identifying conflicts between source documents and a generated summary.Training data is generated by applying a series of rule-based transformations to the sentences of source documents.The factual consistency model is then trained jointly for three tasks: 1) identify whether sentences remain factually consistent after transformation, 2) extract a span in the source documents to support the consistency prediction, 3) extract a span in the summary sentence that is inconsistent if one exists.Transferring this model to summaries generated by several state-of-the art models reveals that this highly scalable approach substantially outperforms previous models, including those trained with strong supervision using standard datasets for natural language inference and fact checking.Additionally, human evaluation shows that the auxiliary span extraction tasks provide useful assistance in the process of verifying factual consistency.
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“In most previous works, factuality has been defined as whether a claim in a text can be supported by evidence from a separate, trustworthy knowledge base, with applications in fact-checking (Thorne et al., 2018b) (where the knowledge base is a large source like Wikipedia) and summarization (Kryscinski et al., 2020) (where the knowledge base is an input document or documents).”
From FacTool: Factuality Detection in Generative AI - A Tool Augmented Framework for Multi-Task and Multi-Domain Scenarios (2023) · cites this paper as Kryscinski et al., 2020
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe source backs part of the claim, not all of it — or backs it for a different population, condition or comparison.
In the citing paper
“Additionally, hallucinations are observed over a wide range of tasks beyond pure fact verification (Kryscinski et al., 2020; Maynez et al., 2020).”
From SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models (2023) · cites this paper as Kryscinski et al., 2020
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“Research suggests that up to 30% of machine-generated abstractive summaries may contain factual inconsistencies [52, 53].”
From All Public Voices Are Equal, But Are Some More Equal Than Others to LLMs? (2026) · cites this paper as [53]
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“Results show that the performance of their FactCC model surpasses the classifiers trained on the MNLI or FEVER datasets.”
From Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation (2023) · cites this paper as [126]
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“These methods, such as entity swapping and sentence negation (Kryscinski et al., 2020;Goyal and Durrett, 2021), were designed to target specific error types that occurred in claims from earlier summarization models.”
From MiniCheck: Efficient Fact-Checking of LLMs on Grounding Documents (2024) · cites this paper as Kryscinski et al., 2020
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“In response to this challenge, a surge of research explores leveraging data-augmentation methods to construct synthetical data for fine-tuning the classifier, either by rule-based perturbation [79, 152, 266] or generation [389].”
From A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions (2025) · cites this paper as [152]
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“most prior studies have primarily concentrated on task-specific hallucinations, such as abstractive summarization [81, 102, 152, 208, 236, 310], data-to-text[240, 296], and machine translation [389].”
From A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions (2025) · cites this paper as [152]
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“This approach has been widely studied in the summarization literature and recent work in factual precision (Kryscinski et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020; Gao et al., 2022; Manakul et al., 2023).”
From FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation (2023) · cites this paper as Kryscinski et al., 2020
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Citations
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation
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“…detection benchmarks, most prior studies have primarily concentrated on task-specific hallucinations, such as abstractive summarization (Kryscinski et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020a; Maynez et al., 2020; Fabbri et al., 2021; Goyal and Durrett, 2021; Pagnoni et al., 2021; Tang et al.,…”
Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap
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On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization
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G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using Gpt-4 with Better Human Alignment
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Metadata
- Authors
- Kryscinski, W., McCann, B., Xiong, C., & Socher, R.
- Affiliations
- Salesforce (United States) (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
- Published
- 2020
- Pages
- 9332-9346
- OpenAlex
- W2981456979
- Cited by
- 669
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2026: 94 · 2025: 86 · 2024: 56 · 2023: 171 · 2022: 106 · 2021: 118 · 2020: 37
- FWCI
- 41.26
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Advanced Text Analysis Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
- Keywords
- abstractive summarization, factual consistency, weakly supervised learning, rule-based transformation, span extraction, natural language inference, fact-checking, summarization evaluation metrics
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