Retrieval Augmentation Reduces Hallucination in Conversation
Open accessAbstract
Despite showing increasingly human-like conversational abilities, state-of-the-art dialogue models often suffer from factual incorrectness and hallucination of knowledge (Roller et al., 2021).In this work we explore the use of neural-retrieval-in-the-loop architectures -recently shown to be effective in open-domain QA (Lewis et al., 2020b; Izacard and Grave, 2021b) -for knowledge-grounded dialogue, a task that is arguably more challenging as it requires querying based on complex multi-turn dialogue context and generating conversationally coherent responses.We study various types of architectures with multiple components -retrievers, rankers, and encoder-decoders -with the goal of maximizing knowledgeability while retaining conversational ability.We demonstrate that our best models obtain state-of-the-art performance on two knowledge-grounded conversational tasks.The models exhibit open-domain conversational capabilities, generalize effectively to scenarios not within the training data, and, as verified by human evaluations, substantially reduce the well-known problem of knowledge hallucination in state-of-the-art chatbots. * Equal ContributionThe following is a conversation with an AI assistant.The assistant is helpful, creative, clever, and very friendly.Human: Hello, who are you?AI: I am an AI created by OpenAI.How can I help you today?Human: Tell me about Kyunghyun
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Long-context strategies and retrieval-augmented generation techniques have improved LLMs' memory in handling long-term tasks.
“Although long-context strategies (Bertsch et al., 2024) and retrieval-augmented generation techniques (Shuster et al., 2021) have improved LLMs' memory in handling long-term tasks, these text-based memory methods face significant limitations in terms of token count, computational cost, and inference time (Zhang et al., 2024).”
From Evaluating the Long-Term Memory of Large Language Models (2025) · cites this paper as Shuster et al., 2021
The Introduction and Discussion (page numbers unavailable in our copy) report that retrieval-augmented models improve performance in knowledge-grounded, multi-turn dialogue. They do not establish that these techniques improve LLMs’ memory on long-term tasks; the paper’s reference to retrieval used “as a memory” appears in Related Work, not as its own finding. (LLM, conf=0.82)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredDeep learning based NLG generation is prone to hallucinate unintended text, which degrades system performance and fails to meet user expectations in many real-world scenarios.
“However, it is also apparent that deep learning based generation is prone to hallucinate unintended text, which degrades the system performance and fails to meet user expectations in many real-world scenarios.”
From Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation (2023) · cites this paper as [121]
The Introduction says that even large dialogue models generate plausible but factually incorrect statements, and the Conclusion calls this an important problem. The human-evaluation section treats hallucination as an aspect of model performance. Our copy does not establish that it fails user expectations in many real-world scenarios. (LLM, conf=0.82)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredHuman evaluation is still one of the most commonly used approaches for evaluating hallucinations in NLG due to the challenging and imperfect nature of current automatic evaluation.
“Due to the challenging and imperfect nature of the current automatic evaluation of hallucinations in NLG, human evaluation [226, 233] is still one of the most commonly used approaches.”
From Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation (2023) · cites this paper as [233]
Section 4.2.1 describes human annotation of hallucinations in conversational responses, and Section 5 says standard dialogue metrics are insufficient to capture hallucination. The paper does not establish that human evaluation is one of the most commonly used approaches across NLG. (LLM, conf=0.84)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredRAG systems improve factual consistency and provide traceable evidence for generated responses.
“RAG systems improve factual consistency and provide traceable evidence for generated responses (Shuster et al., 2021;Gao et al., 2023).”
From Improving Amharic Information Retrieval with Translative and Multi-Agent Debate Retrieval Augmented Generation (2026) · cites this paper as Shuster et al., 2021
Section 4.2.1 reports that retrieval-augmented models had dramatically lower hallucination rates in human evaluations, supporting improved factuality in the studied conversations. The same section says evaluators were shown a retrieved document to help interpret where a response’s knowledge came from, but it does not establish that RAG systems generally provide traceable evidence for their generated responses. Page numbers are unavailable in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.84)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe efficacy of long-context LLMs and RAG techniques in very long-term dialogues remains unexplored.
“Despite advancements in longcontext large language models (LLMs) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) techniques, their efficacy in very long-term dialogues remains unexplored.”
From Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents (2024) · cites this paper as Shuster et al., 2021
The Introduction (page unavailable) says RAG had not yet been applied to open-domain knowledge-grounded dialogue, supporting a narrower claim about a gap in prior research. The paper then evaluates RAG on multi-turn dialogue; it does not establish that the efficacy of long-context LLMs or RAG in very long-term dialogues remains unexplored. (LLM, conf=0.80)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
These methods have shown promising results in significantly reducing hallucinated content and enhancing the accuracy, reliability, and faithfulness of model outputs.
“These methods have shown promising results in significantly reducing hallucinated content and enhancing the accuracy, reliability, and faithfulness of model outputs.”
From Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2024) · cites this paper as Shuster et al. 2021
The Introduction reports that the best retrieval-augmented conversational models reduced hallucinated responses by over 60%, and §4.2.1 reports higher knowledgeability. These findings support improved factual accuracy in the tested dialogue tasks, but the paper does not establish improved reliability and faithfulness of model outputs generally. (LLM, conf=0.83)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredSuch wrong association results in generation with facts mixed up between two similar entities.
“Such wrong association results in generation with facts mixed up between two similar entities [60, 233].”
From Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation (2023) · cites this paper as [233]
Retrieval helps substantially in improving performance on KGD tasks and in reducing hallucination in conversations without sacrificing conversational ability.
“The experimental results show that retrieval helps substantially in improving performance on KGD tasks and in reducing the hallucination in conversations without sacrificing conversational ability.”
From Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation (2023) · cites this paper as [233]
Recent language models have a tendency to generate false statements.
“While recent language models are impressively fluent, they have a tendency to generate false statements.”
From TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods (2022) · cites this paper as Shuster et al., 2021
Close inspection of LLM outputs sometimes reveals a range of inaccuracies, from minor errors to flat-out hallucinations.
“Close inspection sometimes reveals a range of inaccuracies, from minor errors to flat-out 'hallucinations' (Shuster et al., 2021) (Figure 1).”
From Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model (2023) · cites this paper as Shuster et al., 2021
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019) · Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/n19-1423 · Cited by 48,293 · see citing works
Lewis, M., Liu, Y., Goyal, N., Ghazvininejad, M., Mohamed, A., Levy, O., Stoyanov, V., & Zettlemoyer, L. (2020) · Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.703 · Cited by 8,821 · see citing works
Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs
Johnson, J., Douze, M., & Jegou, H. (2021) · IEEE Transactions on Big Data · doi:10.1109/tbdata.2019.2921572 · Cited by 4,228 · see citing works
Dense passage retrieval for open-domain question answering
Karpukhin, V., Oguz, B., Min, S., Lewis, P., Wu, L., Edunov, S., Chen, D., & Yih, W.-T. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) · doi:10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.550 · Cited by 3,575 · see citing works
Natural Questions: A benchmark for question answering research
Kwiatkowski, T., Palomaki, J., Redfield, O., Collins, M., Parikh, A., Alberti, C., Epstein, D., Polosukhin, I., Devlin, J., Lee, K., et al. (2019) · Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00276 · Cited by 2,069 · see citing works
TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension
Joshi, M., Choi, E., Weld, D., & Zettlemoyer, L. (2017) · Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/p17-1147 · Cited by 1,690 · see citing works
Reading Wikipedia to answer open-domain questions
Chen, D., Fisch, A., Weston, J., & Bordes, A. (2017) · Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/p17-1171 · Cited by 1,546 · see citing works
Self-citationThe Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration
Holtzman, A., Buys, J., Du, L., Forbes, M., & Choi, Y. (2019) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1904.09751 · Cited by 1,304 · see citing works
ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT
Khattab, O., & Zaharia, M. (2020) · Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval · doi:10.1145/3397271.3401075 · Cited by 1,301 · see citing works
Hierarchical Neural Story Generation
Fan, A., Lewis, M., & Dauphin, Y. (2018) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1805.04833 · Cited by 1,242 · see citing works
On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization
Maynez, J., Narayan, S., Bohnet, B., & McDonald, R. (2020) · Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.173 · Cited by 1,185 · see citing works
Recipes for Building an Open-Domain Chatbot
Roller, S., Dinan, E., Goyal, N., Ju, D., Williamson, M., Liu, Y., Xu, J., Ott, M., Smith, E. M., Boureau, Y.-L., et al. (2021) · Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume · doi:10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.24 · Cited by 784 · see citing works
Self-citationTowards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot
Adiwardana, D., Luong, M.-T., So, D. R., Hall, J., Fiedel, N., Thoppilan, R., Yang, Z., Kulshreshtha, A., Nemade, G., Lu, Y., et al. (2020) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2001.09977 · Cited by 614 · see citing works
Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models
Khandelwal, U., Levy, O., Jurafsky, D., Zettlemoyer, L., & Lewis, M. (2019) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1911.00172 · Cited by 285 · see citing works
Learning to Retrieve Reasoning Paths over Wikipedia Graph for Question Answering
Asai, A., Hashimoto, K., Hajishirzi, H., Socher, R., & Xiong, C. (2019) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1911.10470 · Cited by 152 · see citing works
USR: An Unsupervised and Reference Free Evaluation Metric for Dialog Generation
Mehri, S., & Eskenazi, M. (2020) · Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.64 · Cited by 149 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 41
- Jason Baumgartner, Savvas Zannettou, Brian Kee- gan, Megan Squire, and Jeremy Blackburn. 2020. The pushshift reddit dataset. arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.08435. · arXiv
- Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Sandhini Agarwal, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Gretchen Krueger, Tom Henighan, Rewon Child, Aditya Ramesh, Daniel M. Ziegler, Jeffrey Wu, Clemens Winter, Christopher Hesse, Mark Chen, Eric Sigler, Mateusz Litwin, Scott Gray, Benjamin Chess, Jack Clark, Christopher Berner, Sam Mc- Candlish, Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever, and Dario Amodei. 2020. Language models are few-shot learn- ers. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33: Annual Conference on Neural Informa- tion Processing Systems 2020, NeurIPS 2020, De- cember 6-12, 2020, virtual.
- M. D. Bruyn, E. Lotfi, Jeska Buhmann, and W. Daele- mans. 2020. Bart for knowledge grounded conversa- tions. In Converse@KDD.
- Emily Dinan, Varvara Logacheva, Valentin Malykh, Alexander Miller, Kurt Shuster, Jack Urbanek, Douwe Kiela, Arthur Szlam, Iulian Serban, Ryan Lowe, and et al. 2019a. The second conversational intelligence challenge (convai2). The Springer Series on Challenges in Machine Learning, page 187-208. · DOI
- Emily Dinan, Stephen Roller, Kurt Shuster, Angela Fan, Michael Auli, and Jason Weston. 2019b. Wiz- ard of wikipedia: Knowledge-powered conversa- tional agents. In 7th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2019, New Orleans, LA, USA, May 6-9, 2019. OpenReview.net.
- Angela Fan, Claire Gardent, Chloé Braud, and An- toine Bordes. 2021. Augmenting transformers with KNN-based composite memory for dialog. Transac- tions of the Association for Computational Linguis- tics, 9:82-99. · DOI
- Angela Fan, Mike Lewis, and Yann Dauphin. 2018. Hi- erarchical neural story generation. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 889-898, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics. · DOI · Paper page
- Fabian Galetzka, Chukwuemeka Uchenna Eneh, and David Schlangen. 2020. A corpus of controlled opinionated and knowledgeable movie discussions for training neural conversation models. In Proceed- ings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 565-573, Marseille, France. Eu- ropean Language Resources Association.
- Marjan Ghazvininejad, Chris Brockett, Ming-Wei Chang, Bill Dolan, Jianfeng Gao, Wen-tau Yih, and Michel Galley. 2018. A knowledge-grounded neural conversation model. In Proceedings of the Thirty- Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI-18), the 30th innovative Applications of Arti- ficial Intelligence (IAAI-18), and the 8th AAAI Sym- posium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intel- ligence (EAAI-18), New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, February 2-7, 2018, pages 5110-5117. AAAI Press.
- Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Behnam Hedayatnia, Qinglang Chen, Anna Gottardi, Sanjeev Kwatra, Anu Venkatesh, Raefer Gabriel, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, and Amazon Alexa AI. 2019. Topical-chat: Towards knowledge-grounded open-domain conversations. In INTERSPEECH, pages 1891-1895.
- Edouard Grave, Armand Joulin, and Nicolas Usunier. 2017. Improving neural language models with a continuous cache. In 5th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2017, Toulon, France, April 24-26, 2017, Conference Track Pro- ceedings. OpenReview.net.
- Kelvin Guu, Kenton Lee, Zora Tung, Panupong Pasu- pat, and Ming-Wei Chang. 2020. Realm: Retrieval- augmented language model pre-training. arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.08909. · arXiv
- Behnam Hedayatnia, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Seokhwan Kim, Yang Liu, Mihail Eric, and Dilek Hakkani-Tur. 2020. Policy-driven neural response generation for knowledge-grounded dialog systems. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pages 412-421, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Samuel Humeau, Kurt Shuster, Marie-Anne Lachaux, and Jason Weston. 2020. Poly-encoders: Architec- tures and pre-training strategies for fast and accurate multi-sentence scoring. In 8th International Confer- ence on Learning Representations, ICLR 2020, Ad- dis Ababa, Ethiopia, April 26-30, 2020. OpenRe- view.net.
- Gautier Izacard and Edouard Grave. 2021a. Distilling knowledge from reader to retriever for question an- swering. In International Conference on Learning Representations.
- Gautier Izacard and Edouard Grave. 2021b. Lever- aging passage retrieval with generative models for open domain question answering. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 874-880, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Urvashi Khandelwal, Omer Levy, Dan Jurafsky, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Mike Lewis. 2020. Generaliza- tion through memorization: Nearest neighbor lan- guage models. In 8th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2020, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, April 26-30, 2020. OpenReview.net.
- Byeongchang Kim, Jaewoo Ahn, and Gunhee Kim. 2020. Sequential latent knowledge selection for knowledge-grounded dialogue. In 8th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2020, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, April 26-30, 2020.
- D. P. Kinga and J. Ba. 2015. A method for stochastic optimization. In International Conference on Learn- ing Representations (ICLR), volume 5.
- Patrick S. H. Lewis, Ethan Perez, Aleksandra Pik- tus, Fabio Petroni, Vladimir Karpukhin, Naman Goyal, Heinrich Küttler, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel, and Douwe Kiela. 2020b. Retrieval-augmented generation for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Sys- tems 2020, NeurIPS 2020, December 6-12, 2020, virtual.
- Chia-Wei Liu, Ryan Lowe, Iulian Serban, Mike Nose- worthy, Laurent Charlin, and Joelle Pineau. 2016. How NOT to evaluate your dialogue system: An empirical study of unsupervised evaluation metrics for dialogue response generation. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natu- ral Language Processing, pages 2122-2132, Austin, Texas. Association for Computational Linguistics. · DOI
- Longxuan Ma, Wei-Nan Zhang, Runxin Sun, and Ting Liu. 2020. A compare aggregate transformer for un- derstanding document-grounded dialogue. In Find- ings of the Association for Computational Linguis- tics: EMNLP 2020, pages 1358-1367, Online. As- sociation for Computational Linguistics. · DOI
- Stephen Merity, Caiming Xiong, James Bradbury, and Richard Socher. 2017. Pointer sentinel mixture mod- els. In 5th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2017, Toulon, France, April 24-26, 2017, Conference Track Proceedings. Open- Review.net.
- Sabrina J Mielke, Arthur Szlam, Y-Lan Boureau, and Emily Dinan. 2020. Linguistic calibration through metacognition: aligning dialogue agent re- sponses with expected correctness. arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.14983. · arXiv
- Alexander Miller, Will Feng, Dhruv Batra, Antoine Bordes, Adam Fisch, Jiasen Lu, Devi Parikh, and Jason Weston. 2017. ParlAI: A dialog research soft- ware platform. In Proceedings of the 2017 Con- ference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 79-84, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computa- tional Linguistics. · DOI
- Fabio Petroni, Aleksandra Piktus, Angela Fan, Patrick Lewis, Majid Yazdani, Nicola De Cao, James Thorne, Yacine Jernite, Vladimir Karpukhin, Jean Maillard, Vassilis Plachouras, Tim Rocktäschel, and Sebastian Riedel. 2021. KILT: a benchmark for knowledge intensive language tasks. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chap- ter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 2523-2544, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics. · DOI · Paper page
- Fabio Petroni, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel, Patrick Lewis, Anton Bakhtin, Yuxiang Wu, and Alexander Miller. 2019. Language models as knowl- edge bases? In Proceedings of the 2019 Confer- ence on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Confer- ence on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP- IJCNLP), pages 2463-2473, Hong Kong, China. As- sociation for Computational Linguistics. · DOI · Paper page
- Peng Qi, Haejun Lee, OghenetegiriTGSido, and Christopher D. Manning. 2020. Retrieve, rerank, read, then iterate: Answering open-domain ques- tions of arbitrary complexity from text. ArXiv, abs/2010.12527. · arXiv
- Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer, Adam Roberts, Kather- ine Lee, Sharan Narang, Michael Matena, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li, and Peter J. Liu. 2020. Exploring the limits of transfer learning with a unified text-to- text transformer. Journal of Machine Learning Re- search, 21(140):1-67.
- Adam Roberts, Colin Raffel, and Noam Shazeer. 2020. How much knowledge can you pack into the param- eters of a language model? In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 5418-5426, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics. · DOI · Paper page
- Haitian Sun, Tania Bedrax-Weiss, and William Cohen. 2019. PullNet: Open domain question answering with iterative retrieval on knowledge bases and text. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Lan- guage Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2380- 2390, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computa- tional Linguistics. · DOI
- Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. 2017. Attention is all you need. In Advances in Neural Information Pro- cessing Systems 30: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2017, December 4- 9, 2017, Long Beach, CA, USA, pages 5998-6008.
- Ellen M. Voorhees and Dawn M. Tice. 2000. The TREC-8 question answering track. In Proceed- ings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'00), Athens, Greece. European Language Resources As- sociation (ELRA).
- Wenhan Xiong, Xiang Li, Srini Iyer, Jingfei Du, Patrick Lewis, William Yang Wang, Yashar Mehdad, Scott Yih, Sebastian Riedel, Douwe Kiela, and Barlas Oguz. 2021. Answering complex open-domain questions with multi-hop dense retrieval. In Inter- national Conference on Learning Representations.
- Wenhan Xiong, Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Xiaoxiao Guo, and William Yang Wang. 2019. Improving question answering over incomplete KBs with knowledge- aware reader. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Lin- guistics, pages 4258-4264, Florence, Italy. Associa- tion for Computational Linguistics. · DOI
- Dani Yogatama, Cyprien de Masson d'Autume, and Lingpeng Kong. 2021. Adaptive semiparametric language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.02557. · arXiv
- Rowan Zellers, Ari Holtzman, Hannah Rashkin, Yonatan Bisk, Ali Farhadi, Franziska Roesner, and Yejin Choi. 2019. Defending against neural fake news. In Advances in Neural Information Process- ing Systems 32: Annual Conference on Neural Infor- mation Processing Systems 2019, NeurIPS 2019, De- cember 8-14, 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada, pages 9051-9062.
- Xueliang Zhao, Wei Wu, Chongyang Tao, Can Xu, Dongyan Zhao, and Rui Yan. 2020a. Low-resource knowledge-grounded dialogue generation. In 8th International Conference on Learning Representa- tions, ICLR 2020, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, April 26- 30, 2020. OpenReview.net.
- Xueliang Zhao, Wei Wu, Can Xu, Chongyang Tao, Dongyan Zhao, and Rui Yan. 2020b. Knowledge- grounded dialogue generation with pre-trained lan- guage models. In Proceedings of the 2020 Con- ference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 3377-3390, Online. As- sociation for Computational Linguistics. · DOI
- Chunting Zhou, Graham Neubig, Jiatao Gu, Mona Diab, Francisco Guzmán, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Marjan Ghazvininejad. 2021. Detecting halluci- nated content in conditional neural sequence gener- ation. In Findings of the Association for Computa- tional Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021, pages 1393- 1404, Online. Association for Computational Lin- guistics. · DOI · Paper page
- Kangyan Zhou, Shrimai Prabhumoye, and Alan W Black. 2018. A dataset for document grounded con- versations. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Process- ing, pages 708-713, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics. Test Seen Test Unseen Method Knowledge Source PPL F1 B4 RL PPL F1 B4 RL BlenderBot (Roller et al., 2021) None 8.72 18.8 1.3 10.4 17.8 0.7 BART (ours) None 14.7 20.9 1.7 20.3 18.9 18.7 0.9 18.4 GPT-2 Finetune (Zhao et al., 2020c) WoW 15.0 14.4 1.0 18.9 13.8 0.8 E2E Transformer MemNet (Dinan et al., 2019b) WoW 63.5 16.9 97.3 14.4 · DOI
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation
Ji, Z., Lee, N., Frieske, R., Yu, T., Su, D., Xu, Y., Ishii, E., Bang, Y. J., Madotto, A., & Fung, P. (2023) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3571730 · Cited by 5,025 · see citing works
Huang, L., Yu, W., Ma, W., Zhong, W., Feng, Z., Wang, H., Chen, Q., Peng, W., Feng, X., Qin, B., et al. (2025) · ACM Transactions on Information Systems · doi:10.1145/3703155 · Cited by 2,142 · see citing works
“Shuster et al. (2021) introduced the Knowledge F1 metric to assess how well the model’s generation aligns with the supplied knowledge.”
A Survey on RAG Meeting LLMs: Towards Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models
Fan, W., Ding, Y., Ning, L., Wang, S., Li, H., Yin, D., Chua, T.-S., & Li, Q. (2024) · Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining · doi:10.1145/3637528.3671470 · Cited by 827 · see citing works
Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey
Gao, Y., Xiong, Y., Gao, X., Jia, K., Pan, J., Bi, Y., Dai, Y., Sun, J., Wang, M., & Wang, H. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.10997 · Cited by 876 · see citing works
“It is also characterized as a “Retrieve-Read” framework [ Ma et al. , 2023a ] .”
BackgroundTruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods
Lin, S., Hilton, J., & Evans, O. (2022) · Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.229 · Cited by 904 · see citing works
“…Zellers et al., 2019), summarization (Gabriel et al., 2021; Maynez et al., 2020; Stiennon et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020), conversational dialog (Shuster et al., 2021; Roller et al., 2021), and question answering (Dou et al., 2021; Krishna et al., 2021; Lewis et al., 2020; Logan IV et al.,…”
BackgroundInfluentialSelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models
Manakul, P., Liusie, A., & Gales, M. (2023) · Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.557 · Cited by 557 · see citing works
FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation
Min, S., Krishna, K., Lyu, X., Lewis, M., Yih, W.-T., Koh, P., Iyyer, M., Zettlemoyer, L., & Hajishirzi, H. (2023) · Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.741 · Cited by 407 · see citing works
Mallen, A., Asai, A., Zhong, V., Das, R., Khashabi, D., & Hajishirzi, H. (2023) · Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.546 · Cited by 340 · see citing works
Siriwardhana, S., Weerasekera, R., Wen, E., Kaluarachchi, T., Rana, R., & Nanayakkara, S. (2023) · Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00530 · Cited by 337 · see citing works
Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Models
Dahl, M., Magesh, V., Suzgun, M., & Ho, D. E. (2024) · Journal of Legal Analysis · doi:10.1093/jla/laae003 · Cited by 288 · see citing works
“Second, precisely because these queries can be answered with tabular data, legal database-augmented LLMs (Cui et al., 2023; Savelka et al., 2023) are likely to soon solve or at least mask hal-lucinated responses to these queries (Shuster et al., 2021; Peng et al., 2023).”
Huang, L., Yu, W., Ma, W., Zhong, W., Feng, Z., Wang, H., Chen, Q., Peng, W., Feng, X., Qin, B., et al. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.05232 · Cited by 2,516 · see citing works
“Shuster et al. (2021) introduced the Knowledge F1 metric to assess how well the model’s generation aligns with the supplied knowledge.”
AI agents under threat: A survey of key security challenges and future pathways
Deng, Z., Guo, Y., Han, C., Ma, W., Xiong, J., Wen, S., & Xiang, Y. (2025) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3716628 · Cited by 210 · see citing works
Liu, S., McCoy, A. B., & Wright, A. (2025) · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · doi:10.1093/jamia/ocaf008 · Cited by 200 · see citing works
Internet-Augmented Dialogue Generation
Komeili, M., Shuster, K., & Weston, J. (2022) · Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.579 · Cited by 192 · see citing works
Self-citationBeyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversation
Xu, J., Szlam, A., & Weston, J. (2022) · Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.356 · Cited by 188 · see citing works
Self-citationTool Learning with Foundation Models
Qin, Y., Hu, S., Lin, Y., Chen, W., Ding, N., Cui, G., Zeng, Z., Huang, Y., Xiao, C., Han, C., et al. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2304.08354 · Cited by 184 · see citing works
Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models
Xu, Z., Jain, S., & Kankanhalli, M. (2024) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2401.11817 · Cited by 180 · see citing works
“Retrieval-based methods reinforce LLM by knowledge graphs or databases to help correct factual errors in models’ outputs [57, 76].”
BackgroundMethodBeyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversation
Xu, J., Szlam, A., & Weston, J. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2107.07567 · Cited by 148 · see citing works
Self-citationTowards trustworthy LLMs: a review on debiasing and dehallucinating in large language models
Lin, Z., Guan, S., Zhang, W., Zhang, H., Li, Y., & Zhang, H. (2024) · Artificial Intelligence Review · doi:10.1007/s10462-024-10896-y · Cited by 141 · see citing works
On the Origin of Hallucinations in Conversational Models: Is it the Datasets or the Models?
Dziri, N., Milton, S., Yu, M., Zaiane, O., & Reddy, S. (2022) · Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.387 · Cited by 121 · see citing works
Learning the natural history of human disease with generative transformers
Shmatko, A., Jung, A. W., Gaurav, K., Brunak, S., Mortensen, L. H., Birney, E., Fitzgerald, T., & Gerstung, M. (2025) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09529-3 · Cited by 110 · see citing works
Pardos, Z. A., & Bhandari, S. (2024) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0304013 · Cited by 97 · see citing works
Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents
Maharana, A., Lee, D.-H., Tulyakov, S., Bansal, M., Barbieri, F., & Fang, Y. (2024) · Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.747 · Cited by 96 · see citing works
Retrieval-based Language Models and Applications
Asai, A., Min, S., Zhong, Z., & Chen, D. (2023) · Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Tutorial Abstracts) · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.acl-tutorials.6 · Cited by 81 · see citing works
Yan, L., Martinez-Maldonado, R., Jin, Y., Echeverria, V., Milesi, M., Fan, J., Zhao, L., Alfredo, R., Li, X., & Gašević, D. (2025) · Computers & Education · doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2025.105322 · Cited by 85 · see citing works
Contrastive Learning Reduces Hallucination in Conversations
Sun, W., Shi, Z., Gao, S., Ren, P., De Rijke, M., & Ren, Z. (2023) · Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1609/aaai.v37i11.26596 · Cited by 69 · see citing works
Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model
Li, K., Patel, O., Viégas, F., Pfister, H., & Wattenberg, M. (2023) · Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 · doi:10.52202/075280-1797 · Cited by 117 · see citing works
“Close inspection sometimes reveals a range of inaccuracies, from minor errors to flat-out “hallucinations” (Shuster et al., 2021) (Figure 1).”
BackgroundCRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquing
Gou, Z., Shao, Z., Gong, Y., Shen, Y., Yang, Y., Duan, N., & Chen, W. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.11738 · Cited by 57 · see citing works
“, 2022), dialogue generation (Shuster et al., 2021), and table-to-text generation (Parikh et al.”
BackgroundDialFact: A Benchmark for Fact-Checking in Dialogue
Gupta, P., Wu, C.-S., Liu, W., & Xiong, C. (2022) · Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.263 · Cited by 48 · see citing works
Ask in Any Modality: A Comprehensive Survey on Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Abootorabi, M. M., Zobeiri, A., Dehghani, M., Mohammadkhani, M., Mohammadi, B., Ghahroodi, O., Baghshah, M. S., & Asgari, E. (2025) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025 · doi:10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.861 · Cited by 76 · see citing works
Language agents achieve superhuman synthesis of scientific knowledge
Skarlinski, M. D., Cox, S., Laurent, J. M., Braza, J. D., Hinks, M., Hammerling, M. J., Ponnapati, M., Rodriques, S. G., & White, A. D. (2024) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.13740 · Cited by 49 · see citing works
“To compare the performance of PaperQA2 to other retrieval systems, we evaluated the performance of PaperQA with original parameters, commercial systems like Perplexity 21 and Elicit 22 , and frontier (non-RAG models) on LitQA2.”
MethodInfluentialGastroBot: a Chinese gastrointestinal disease chatbot based on the retrieval-augmented generation
Zhou, Q., Liu, C., Duan, Y., Sun, K., Li, Y., Kan, H., Gu, Z., Shu, J., & Hu, J. (2024) · Frontiers in Medicine · doi:10.3389/fmed.2024.1392555 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models
Dhuliawala, S., Komeili, M., Xu, J., Raileanu, R., Li, X., Celikyilmaz, A., & Weston, J. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2309.11495 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
“For example, retrieval-augmented generation can decrease hallucinations by using factual documents for grounding (Shuster et al., 2021; Jiang et al., 2023b; Yu et al., 2023) or chain-of-thought verification (Zhao et al., 2023).”
BackgroundSelf-citationAssisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models
Shao, Y., Jiang, Y., Kanell, T., Xu, P., Khattab, O., & Lam, M. (2024) · Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.347 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
RHO: Reducing Hallucination in Open-domain Dialogues with Knowledge Grounding
Ji, Z., Liu, Z., Lee, N., Yu, T., Wilie, B., Zeng, M., & Fung, P. (2023) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.275 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
Promises and pitfalls of artificial intelligence for legal applications
Kapoor, S., Henderson, P., & Narayanan, A. (2024) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2402.01656 · Cited by 25 · see citing works
Reason first, then respond: Modular Generation for Knowledge-infused Dialogue
Adolphs, L., Shuster, K., Urbanek, J., Szlam, A., & Weston, J. (2022) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.527 · Cited by 25 · see citing works
Self-citationSanthanam, S., Hedayatnia, B., Gella, S., Padmakumar, A., Kim, S., Liu, Y., & Hakkani-Tur, D. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2110.05456 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
Am I Me or You? State-of-the-Art Dialogue Models Cannot Maintain an Identity
Shuster, K., Urbanek, J., Szlam, A., & Weston, J. (2022) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022 · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.182 · Cited by 20 · see citing works
Self-citationFActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation
Min, S., Krishna, K., Lyu, X., Lewis, M., Yih, W.-T., Koh, P. W., Iyyer, M., Zettlemoyer, L., & Hajishirzi, H. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.14251 · Cited by 14 · see citing works
“Most prior work studies factual precision of models supervised for a specific problem such as dialogue (Shuster et al., 2021), or focuses on question answering with short answers (Kadavath et al., 2022; Kandpal et al., 2022; Mallen et al., 2023; Nori et al., 2023).”
BackgroundSun, K., Xu, Y. E., Zha, H., Liu, Y., & Dong, X. L. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2308.10168 · Cited by 13 · see citing works
Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models
Shao, Y., Jiang, Y., Kanell, T. A., Xu, P., Khattab, O., & Lam, M. S. (2024) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2402.14207 · Cited by 10 · see citing works
Truthful AI: Developing and governing AI that does not lie
Evans, O., Cotton-Barratt, O., Finnveden, L., Bales, A., Balwit, A., Wills, P., Righetti, L., & Saunders, W. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2110.06674 · Cited by 39 · see citing works
Efficient Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Knowledge-Aware Response Planning
Nguyen, M., Kishan, K. C., Nguyen, T., Chadha, A., & Vu, T. (2023) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-031-43415-0_35 · Cited by 8 · see citing works
Diversify Question Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer
Gou, Q., Xia, Z., Yu, B., Yu, H., Huang, F., Li, Y., & Cam-Tu, N. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.14503 · Cited by 8 · see citing works
The Effect of Scaling, Retrieval Augmentation and Form on the Factual Consistency of Language Models
Hagström, L., Saynova, D., Norlund, T., Johansson, M., & Johansson, R. (2023) · Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.332 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
Improving Generative Ai Reliability: A Qualitative Study of Hallucination in Large Language Models
Gwon, H. J., Yoo, Y., & Lee, J. Y. (2025) · doi:10.2139/ssrn.5118420 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Evaluating the Long-Term Memory of Large Language Models
Jia, Z., Liu, Q., Li, H., Chen, Y., & Liu, J. (2025) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025 · doi:10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.1014 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
“Although long-context strategies (Bertsch et al., 2024) and retrieval-augmented generation techniques (Shuster et al., 2021) have improved LLMs’ memory in handling long-term tasks, these text-based memory methods face significant limitations in terms of token count, computational cost, and…”
Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents
Maharana, A., Lee, D.-H., Tulyakov, S., Bansal, M., Barbieri, F., & Fang, Y. (2024) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2402.17753 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
“Multimodal dialog is enabled with image-sharing and image-response behaviors. techniques (Shuster et al., 2021; Ram et al., 2023; Shi et al., 2023), there is still a need for thorough evaluation of their efficacy in handling very long conversations.”
BackgroundHallE-Control: Controlling Object Hallucination in Large Multimodal Models
Zhai, B., Yang, S., Xu, C., Shen, S., Keutzer, K., Li, C., & Li, M. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.01779 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Less is More: Making Smaller Language Models Competent Subgraph Retrievers for Multi-hop KGQA
Huang, W., Zhou, G., Wang, H., Vougiouklis, P., Lapata, M., & Pan, J. Z. (2024) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 · doi:10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.927 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Do as We Do, Not as You Think: the Conformity of Large Language Models
Weng, Z., Chen, G., & Wang, W. (2025) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.13381 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
Can AI Be a Good Peer Reviewer? A Survey of Peer Review Process, Evaluation, and the Future
Wu, S., Jiang, O., Zhao, Y., Hu, T., Ma, Y., Zhang, K., Patwardhan, M., & Cohan, A. (2026) · Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1504 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
Jotie, A. A., & Mitra, P. (2026) · Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference · doi:10.63317/3hbm9z4okcrx
Selective Forgetting: A Graph-Based Memory Framework for Long-Term LLM Agents
Rusu, T., Khanzadeh, S., & Alalfi, M. (2026) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2608.28978
“Dense retrieval Karpukhin et al. [2020] and jointly pre-trained retrieval-reading models such as REALM Guu et al. [2020] and RETRO Borgeaud et al. [2022] improved retrieval quality on scale, while retrieval has been shown to reduce hallucinations in dialogue Shuster et al. [2021].”
Shanivendra, A. C. (2026) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2603.14170
AlignCheck: a Semantic Open-Domain Metric for Factual Consistency Assessment
Aghaebrahimian, A. (2025) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.03634
“Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various natural language generation tasks, including question answering (Deutsch et al., 2021), text summarization (Goyal et al., 2023), and dialogue systems (Shuster et al., 2021).”
Elastic Weight Removal for Faithful and Abstractive Dialogue Generation
Daheim, N., Dziri, N., Sachan, M., Gurevych, I., & Ponti, E. M. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.17574
- Authors
- Shuster, K., Poff, S., Chen, M., Kiela, D., & Weston, J.
- Affiliations
- Meta (United States) (US)
- ORCID
- Poff, Spencer
- Venue
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
- Published
- 2021
- Pages
- 3784-3803
- OpenAlex
- W3155807546
- Cited by
- 575
- References
- 16
- Citations by year
- 2026: 148 · 2025: 166 · 2024: 105 · 2023: 84 · 2022: 54 · 2021: 18
- FWCI
- 30.14
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP (Findings of EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
- Keywords
- retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge-grounded dialogue, neural retrieval, rankers, encoder-decoder architecture, chatbots, factual accuracy, multi-turn dialogue, open-domain conversation
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review