Mitigating Hallucination in Fictional Character Role-Play

Nafis Sadeq, Zhouhang Xie, Byungkyu Kang, Prarit Lamba, Xiang Gao, Julian McAuley


Abstract
Role-playing has wide-ranging applications in customer support, embodied agents, and computational social science. The influence of parametric world knowledge of large language models (LLMs) often causes role-playing characters to act out of character and to hallucinate about things outside the scope of their knowledge. In this work, we focus on the evaluation and mitigation of hallucination in fictional character role-play. We introduce a dataset with over 2,000 characters and 72,000 interviews, including 18,000 adversarial questions. We propose RoleFact, a role-playing method that mitigates hallucination by modulating the influence of parametric knowledge using a pre-calibrated confidence threshold. Experiments show that the proposed method improves the factual precision of generated responses by 18% for adversarial questions with a 44% reduction in temporal hallucination for time-sensitive interviews. The code and the dataset are available at https://github.com/NafisSadeq/rolefact.git.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.846
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14467–14479
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest_wac_2008/2024.findings-emnlp.846/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.846
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nafis Sadeq, Zhouhang Xie, Byungkyu Kang, Prarit Lamba, Xiang Gao, and Julian McAuley. 2024. Mitigating Hallucination in Fictional Character Role-Play. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 14467–14479, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mitigating Hallucination in Fictional Character Role-Play (Sadeq et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest_wac_2008/2024.findings-emnlp.846.pdf
Software:
 2024.findings-emnlp.846.software.zip
Data:
 2024.findings-emnlp.846.data.zip