SciHallu: A Multi-Granularity Hallucination Detection Dataset for Scientific Writing

Adiba Ibnat Hossain, Sagnik Ray Choudhury, Hamed Alhoori


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support scientific writing, but their tendency to produce hallucinated content threatens academic reliability. Existing benchmarks have addressed hallucination detection in general-domain tasks, such as fact-checking or question answering, but they do not reflect the fine-grained, domain-specific needs of scientific communication. We introduce SciHallu, a dataset for identifying hallucinations in academic text at three levels of granularity: token, sentence, and paragraph. To establish a reliable ground truth, we select source passages from research papers published prior to the widespread adoption of LLMs. Our dataset includes both hallucinated and non-hallucinated paragraph instances, constructed through controlled perturbations at varying levels of noise and validated by human annotators. A rationale is paired with each instance, explaining the nature of the modification. SciHallu covers multiple academic fields, such as Computer Science, Health Sciences, and Humanities and Social Sciences. It is built using a model-guided annotation pipeline, followed by expert human validation. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on both binary and fine-grained classification tasks, revealing challenges in detecting subtle hallucinations. SciHallu supports the development of context-aware systems for more trustworthy scientific content generation.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-long.70
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1277–1304
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.70/
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Cite (ACL):
Adiba Ibnat Hossain, Sagnik Ray Choudhury, and Hamed Alhoori. 2025. SciHallu: A Multi-Granularity Hallucination Detection Dataset for Scientific Writing. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1277–1304, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SciHallu: A Multi-Granularity Hallucination Detection Dataset for Scientific Writing (Hossain et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.70.pdf