RAGTruth: A Hallucination Corpus for Developing Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

Cheng Niu, Yuanhao Wu, Juno Zhu, Siliang Xu, KaShun Shum, Randy Zhong, Juntong Song, Tong Zhang


Abstract
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a main technique for alleviating hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). Despite the integration of RAG, LLMs may still present unsupported or contradictory claims to the retrieved contents. In order to develop effective hallucination prevention strategies under RAG, it is important to create benchmark datasets that can measure the extent of hallucination. This paper presents RAGTruth, a corpus tailored for analyzing word-level hallucinations in various domains and tasks within the standard RAG frameworks for LLM applications. RAGTruth comprises nearly 18,000 naturally generated responses from diverse LLMs using RAG. These responses have undergone meticulous manual annotations at both the individual case and word levels, incorporating evaluations of hallucination intensity. We not only benchmark hallucination frequencies across different LLMs, but also critically assess the effectiveness of several existing hallucination detection methodologies. We show that using a high-quality dataset such as RAGTruth, it is possible to finetune a relatively small LLM and achieve a competitive hallucination detection performance when compared to the existing prompt-based approaches using state-of-the-art LLMs such as GPT-4. Furthermore, the finetuned model can effectively mitigate hallucination in LLM responses.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.585
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10862–10878
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.585
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cheng Niu, Yuanhao Wu, Juno Zhu, Siliang Xu, KaShun Shum, Randy Zhong, Juntong Song, and Tong Zhang. 2024. RAGTruth: A Hallucination Corpus for Developing Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10862–10878, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RAGTruth: A Hallucination Corpus for Developing Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (Niu et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-long.585.pdf