TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models
Zorik Gekhman, Jonathan Herzig, Roee Aharoni, Chen Elkind, Idan Szpektor
Abstract
Factual consistency evaluation is often conducted using Natural Language Inference (NLI) models, yet these models exhibit limited success in evaluating summaries. Previous work improved such models with synthetic training data. However, the data is typically based on perturbed human-written summaries, which often differ in their characteristics from real model-generated summaries and have limited coverage of possible factual errors. Alternatively, large language models (LLMs) have recently shown promising results in directly evaluating generative tasks, but are too computationally expensive for practical use. Motivated by these limitations, we introduce TrueTeacher, a method for generating synthetic data by annotating diverse model-generated summaries using a LLM. Unlike prior work, TrueTeacher does not rely on human-written summaries, and is multilingual by nature. Experiments on the TRUE benchmark show that a student model trained using our data, substantially outperforms both the state-of-the-art model with similar capacity, and the LLM teacher. In a systematic study, we compare TrueTeacher to existing synthetic data generation methods and demonstrate its superiority and robustness to domain-shift. We also show that our method generalizes to multilingual scenarios. Lastly, we release our large scale synthetic dataset (1.4M examples), generated using TrueTeacher, and a checkpoint trained on this data.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.127
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2053–2070
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.127
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.127
- Cite (ACL):
- Zorik Gekhman, Jonathan Herzig, Roee Aharoni, Chen Elkind, and Idan Szpektor. 2023. TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2053–2070, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models (Gekhman et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2023.emnlp-main.127.pdf