Attribution, Citation, and Quotation: A Survey of Evidence-based Text Generation with Large Language Models

Tobias Schreieder, Tim Schopf, Michael F\"arber


Abstract
The increasing adoption of large language models (LLMs) has raised serious concerns about their reliability and trustworthiness. As a result, a growing body of research focuses on evidence-based text generation with LLMs, aiming to link model outputs to supporting evidence to ensure traceability and verifiability. However, the field is fragmented due to inconsistent terminology, isolated evaluation practices, and a lack of unified benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we systematically analyze 134 papers, introduce a unified taxonomy of evidence-based text generation with LLMs, and investigate 300 evaluation metrics across seven key dimensions. Thereby, we focus on approaches that use citations, attribution, or quotations for evidence-based text generation. Building on this, we examine the distinctive characteristics and representative methods in the field. Finally, we highlight open challenges and outline promising directions for future work.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1430
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
30956–31000
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1430/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tobias Schreieder, Tim Schopf, and Michael F\"arber. 2026. Attribution, Citation, and Quotation: A Survey of Evidence-based Text Generation with Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 30956–31000, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Attribution, Citation, and Quotation: A Survey of Evidence-based Text Generation with Large Language Models (Schreieder et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1430.pdf
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