DyKnow: Dynamically Verifying Time-Sensitive Factual Knowledge in LLMs

Seyed Mahed Mousavi, Simone Alghisi, Giuseppe Riccardi


Abstract
LLMs acquire knowledge from massive data snapshots collected at different timestamps. Their knowledge is then commonly evaluated using static benchmarks. However, factual knowledge is generally subject to time-sensitive changes, and static benchmarks cannot address those cases. We present an approach to dynamically evaluate the knowledge in LLMs and their time-sensitiveness against Wikidata, a publicly available up-to-date knowledge graph. We evaluate the time-sensitive knowledge in twenty-four private and open-source LLMs, as well as the effectiveness of four editing methods in updating the outdated facts. Our results show that 1) outdatedness is a critical problem across state-of-the-art LLMs; 2) LLMs output inconsistent answers when prompted with slight variations of the question prompt; and 3) the performance of the state-of-the-art knowledge editing algorithms is very limited, as they can not reduce the cases of outdatedness and output inconsistency.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.471
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8014–8029
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2024.findings-emnlp.471/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.471
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seyed Mahed Mousavi, Simone Alghisi, and Giuseppe Riccardi. 2024. DyKnow: Dynamically Verifying Time-Sensitive Factual Knowledge in LLMs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 8014–8029, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DyKnow: Dynamically Verifying Time-Sensitive Factual Knowledge in LLMs (Mousavi et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2024.findings-emnlp.471.pdf