Cited by 60Topic ModelingMisinformation and Its ImpactsNatural Language Processing Techniques

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LM vs LM: Detecting Factual Errors via Cross Examination

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Cohen, Roi, Hamri, May, Geva, Mor, Globerson, Amir·2023·Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Abstract

A prominent weakness of modern language models (LMs) is their tendency to generate factually incorrect text, which hinders their usability.A natural question is whether such factual errors can be detected automatically.Inspired by truth-seeking mechanisms in law, we propose a factuality evaluation framework for LMs that is based on cross-examination.Our key idea is that an incorrect claim is likely to result in inconsistency with other claims that the model generates.To discover such inconsistencies, we facilitate a multi-turn interaction between the LM that generated the claim and another LM (acting as an examiner) which introduces questions to discover inconsistencies.We empirically evaluate our method on factual claims made by multiple recent LMs on four benchmarks, finding that it outperforms existing methods and baselines, often by a large gap.Our results demonstrate the potential of using interacting LMs to capture factual errors.

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  • Cohen et al. introduced the LMvLM approach, which leverages an examiner LM to question an examinee LM, aiming to unveil inconsistencies of claims during multi-turn interaction.

    “Drawing inspiration from legal cross-examination practices, Cohen et al. [62] introduced the LMvLM approach. This strategy leverages an examiner LM to question an examinee LM, aiming to unveil inconsistencies of claims during multi-turn interaction.”

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Metadata

Authors
Cohen, R., Hamri, M., Geva, M., & Globerson, A.
Affiliations
  • Tel Aviv University (IL)
  • Google DeepMind (United Kingdom) (GB)
  • Google (United States) (US)
Corresponding author
Hamri, May
Venue
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Published
2023
Pages
12621-12640
OpenAlex
W4389520333
Cited by
60
References
41
Citations by year
2026: 20 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 4
FWCI
10.63
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
large language models, cross-examination, factuality evaluation, multi-turn interaction, inconsistency detection, factual claims

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