Entity-Based Knowledge Conflicts in Question Answering

Shayne Longpre, Kartik Perisetla, Anthony Chen, Nikhil Ramesh, Chris DuBois, Sameer Singh


Abstract
Knowledge-dependent tasks typically use two sources of knowledge: parametric, learned at training time, and contextual, given as a passage at inference time. To understand how models use these sources together, we formalize the problem of knowledge conflicts, where the contextual information contradicts the learned information. Analyzing the behaviour of popular models, we measure their over-reliance on memorized information (the cause of hallucinations), and uncover important factors that exacerbate this behaviour. Lastly, we propose a simple method to mitigate over-reliance on parametric knowledge, which minimizes hallucination, and improves out-of-distribution generalization by 4% - 7%. Our findings demonstrate the importance for practitioners to evaluate model tendency to hallucinate rather than read, and show that our mitigation strategy encourages generalization to evolving information (i.e. time-dependent queries). To encourage these practices, we have released our framework for generating knowledge conflicts.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.565
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7052–7063
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.565
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.565
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shayne Longpre, Kartik Perisetla, Anthony Chen, Nikhil Ramesh, Chris DuBois, and Sameer Singh. 2021. Entity-Based Knowledge Conflicts in Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7052–7063, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Entity-Based Knowledge Conflicts in Question Answering (Longpre et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2021.emnlp-main.565.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2021.emnlp-main.565.mp4
Code
 apple/ml-knowledge-conflicts
Data
Natural QuestionsNewsQA