Jinhua Gao
2025
ALiiCE: Evaluating Positional Fine-grained Citation Generation
Yilong Xu
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Jinhua Gao
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Xiaoming Yu
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Baolong Bi
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Huawei Shen
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Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Model (LLM) can enhance its credibility and verifiability by generating text with citations. However, existing research on citation generation is predominantly limited to sentence-level statements, neglecting the significance of positional fine-grained citations that can appear anywhere within sentences. To facilitate further exploration of the positional fine-grained citation generation, we propose ALiiCE, the first automatic evaluation framework for this task. Our method employs a dependency tree based approach to parse the sentence-level claim into atomic claims. Then ALiiCE evaluates citation quality using three metrics, including positional fine-grained citation recall, precision, and coefficient of variation of citation positions. We evaluate the positional fine-grained citation generation performance of several LLMs on long-form QA datasets. Our experiments and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and reasonableness of ALiiCE. We offer our insights into the current advancements and future directions for the positional fine-grained citation generation task.