Sivan Milton


2022

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On the Origin of Hallucinations in Conversational Models: Is it the Datasets or the Models?
Nouha Dziri | Sivan Milton | Mo Yu | Osmar Zaiane | Siva Reddy
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Knowledge-grounded conversational models are known to suffer from producing factually invalid statements, a phenomenon commonly called hallucination. In this work, we investigate the underlying causes of this phenomenon: is hallucination due to the training data, or to the models? We conduct a comprehensive human study on both existing knowledge-grounded conversational benchmarks and several state-of-the-art models. Our study reveals that the standard benchmarks consist of > 60% hallucinated responses, leading to models that not only hallucinate but even amplify hallucinations. Our findings raise important questions on the quality of existing datasets and models trained using them. We make our annotations publicly available for future research.