Improving LLM’s Attachment to External Knowledge In Dialogue Generation Tasks Through Entity Anonymization

Hadi Sheikhi, Chenyang Huang, Osmar Zaiane


Abstract
Knowledge graph-based dialogue generation (KG-DG) is a challenging task requiring models to effectively incorporate external knowledge into conversational responses. While large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results across various NLP tasks, their ability to utilize external knowledge in KG-DG remains under-explored. We observe that LLMs often rely on internal knowledge, leading to detachment from provided knowledge graphs, even when they are given a flawlessly retrieved knowledge graph. First, we introduce LLM-KAT, an evaluation procedure for measuring knowledge attachment in generated responses. Second, we propose a simple yet effective entity anonymization technique to encourage LLMs to better leverage external knowledge. Experiments on the OpenDialKG dataset demonstrate that our approach improves LLMs’ attachment on external knowledge.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-short.38
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:
472–483
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-short.38/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Hadi Sheikhi, Chenyang Huang, and Osmar Zaiane. 2025. Improving LLM’s Attachment to External Knowledge In Dialogue Generation Tasks Through Entity Anonymization. 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 472–483, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving LLM’s Attachment to External Knowledge In Dialogue Generation Tasks Through Entity Anonymization (Sheikhi et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-short.38.pdf