FactSelfCheck: Fact-Level Black-Box Hallucination Detection for LLMs

Albert Sawczyn, Jakub Binkowski, Denis Janiak, Bogdan Gabrys, Tomasz Jan Kajdanowicz


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently generate hallucinated content, posing significant challenges for applications where factuality is crucial. While existing hallucination detection methods typically operate at the sentence level or passage level, we propose FactSelfCheck, a novel zero-resource black-box sampling-based method that enables fine-grained fact-level detection. Our approach represents text as interpretable knowledge graphs consisting of facts in the form of triples, providing clearer insights into content factuality than traditional approaches. Through analyzing factual consistency across multiple LLM responses, we compute fine-grained hallucination scores without requiring external resources or training data. Our evaluation demonstrates that FactSelfCheck performs competitively with leading sentence-level sampling-based methods while providing more detailed and interpretable insights. Most notably, our fact-level approach significantly improves hallucination correction, achieving a 35.5% increase in factual content compared to the baseline, while sentence-level SelfCheckGPT yields only a 10.6% improvement. The granular nature of our detection enables more precise identification and correction of hallucinated content. Additionally, we contribute FavaMultiSamples, a novel dataset that addresses a gap in the field by providing the research community with a second dataset for evaluating sampling-based methods.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-eacl.296
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
5603–5621
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.296/
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Cite (ACL):
Albert Sawczyn, Jakub Binkowski, Denis Janiak, Bogdan Gabrys, and Tomasz Jan Kajdanowicz. 2026. FactSelfCheck: Fact-Level Black-Box Hallucination Detection for LLMs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026, pages 5603–5621, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FactSelfCheck: Fact-Level Black-Box Hallucination Detection for LLMs (Sawczyn et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.296.pdf
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