Abstract
Recent work has identified noisy and misannotated data as a core cause of hallucinations and unfaithful outputs in Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. Consequently, identifying and removing these examples is a key open challenge in creating reliable NLG systems. In this work, we introduce a framework to identify and remove low-quality training instances that lead to undesirable outputs, such as faithfulness errors in text summarization. We show that existing approaches for error tracing, such as gradient-based influence measures, do not perform reliably for detecting faithfulness errors in NLG datasets. We overcome the drawbacks of existing error tracing methods through a new, contrast-based estimate that compares undesired generations to human-corrected outputs. Our proposed method can achieve a mean average precision of 0.93 at detecting known data errors across synthetic tasks with known ground truth, substantially outperforming existing approaches. Using this approach and re-training models on cleaned data leads to a 70% reduction in entity hallucinations on the NYT dataset and a 55% reduction in semantic errors on the E2E dataset.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-long.643
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 11482–11498
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.643
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.643
- Cite (ACL):
- Faisal Ladhak, Esin Durmus, and Tatsunori Hashimoto. 2023. Contrastive Error Attribution for Finetuned Language Models. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 11482–11498, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Contrastive Error Attribution for Finetuned Language Models (Ladhak et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/2023.acl-long.643.pdf