@article{han-etal-2026-tcmphal,
    title = "{TCMPH}al: A Large-scale Dataset for Hallucination Detection in Traditional {C}hinese Medicine Pharmacy",
    author = "Han, Nijia  and
      Wang, Zimu  and
      Xie, Ziwen  and
      Wang, Wei  and
      Meng, Jia  and
      Moraros, John  and
      Wang, Shuihua",
    editor = "Piperidis, Stelios  and
      Bel, N{\'u}ria  and
      van den Heuvel, Henk  and
      Ide, Nancy  and
      Krek, Simon  and
      Toral, Antonio",
    journal = "International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation",
    volume = "main",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.552/",
    pages = "6939--6948",
    abstract = "The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) in medicine highlights their potential to revolutionize research in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). While these models have shown great promise in assisting TCM practitioners by answering herb-related questions, generating syndrome-differentiation reports, and recommending classical formulas, a persistent challenge that arises is the issue of hallucination, where LLMs might produce content that appears plausible yet inaccurate. This issue has received limited attention within the context of TCM research, leaving a significant gap in understanding how hallucination manifests within the unique theoretical frameworks and diagnostic principles. Motivated by this phenomenon, we present TCMPHal, the first dataset specifically curated for hallucination detection in TCM pharmacy, comprising 10,000 high-quality question-answer pairs with hallucination annotations. Our experimental results across diverse LLMs, under standard, knowledge-based, and search engine-augmented conditions, demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of these models. A notable observation is that, for thinking LLMs, incorporating search engine results yields minimal improvement over their intrinsic reasoning abilities. We further conduct an in-depth error analysis, paving the way for future research directions in this domain. We release the TCMPHal dataset at https://github.com/hanninaa/TCMP."
}