Explainable Hallucination through Natural Language Inference Mapping

Wei-Fan Chen, Zhixue Zhao, Akbar Karimi, Lucie Flek


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) often generate hallucinated content, making it crucial to identify and quantify inconsistencies in their outputs. We introduce HaluMap, a post-hoc framework that detects hallucinations by mapping entailment and contradiction relations between source inputs and generated outputs using a natural language inference (NLI) model. To improve reliability, we propose a calibration step leveraging intra-text relations to refine predictions. HaluMap outperforms state-of-the-art NLI-based methods by five percentage points compared to other training-free approaches, while providing clear, interpretable explanations. As a training-free and model-agnostic approach, HaluMap offers a practical solution for verifying LLM outputs across diverse NLP tasks. The resources of this paper are available at https://github.com/caisa-lab/acl25-halumap.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.96
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1888–1896
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.96/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wei-Fan Chen, Zhixue Zhao, Akbar Karimi, and Lucie Flek. 2025. Explainable Hallucination through Natural Language Inference Mapping. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 1888–1896, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Explainable Hallucination through Natural Language Inference Mapping (Chen et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.96.pdf