JointCQ: Improving Factual Hallucination Detection with Joint Claim and Query Generation

Fan Xu, Huixuan Zhang, Zhenliang Zhang, Jiahao Wang, Xiaojun Wan


Abstract
Current large language models (LLMs) often suffer from hallucination issues, i,e, generating content that appears factual but is actually unreliable. A typical hallucination detection pipeline involves response decomposition (i.e., claim extraction), query generation, evidence collection (i.e., search or retrieval), and claim verification. However, existing methods exhibit limitations in the first two stages, such as context loss during claim extraction and low specificity in query generation, resulting in degraded performance across the hallucination detection pipeline. In this work, we introduce JointCQ, a joint claim-and-query generation framework designed to construct an effective and efficient claim-query generator. Our framework leverages elaborately designed evaluation criteria to filter synthesized training data, and finetunes a language model for joint claim extraction and query generation, providing reliable and informative inputs for downstream search and verification. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods on multiple open-domain QA hallucination detection benchmarks, advancing the goal of more trustworthy and transparent language model systems.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.58
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
1138–1159
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.58/
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Cite (ACL):
Fan Xu, Huixuan Zhang, Zhenliang Zhang, Jiahao Wang, and Xiaojun Wan. 2026. JointCQ: Improving Factual Hallucination Detection with Joint Claim and Query Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 1138–1159, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
JointCQ: Improving Factual Hallucination Detection with Joint Claim and Query Generation (Xu et al., Findings 2026)
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