TCMPHal: A Large-scale Dataset for Hallucination Detection in Traditional Chinese Medicine Pharmacy
Nijia Han, Zimu Wang, Ziwen Xie, Wei Wang, Jia Meng, John Moraros, Shuihua Wang
Abstract
The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) in medicine highlights their potential to revolutionize research in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). While these models have shown great promise in assisting TCM practitioners by answering herb-related questions, generating syndrome-differentiation reports, and recommending classical formulas, a persistent challenge that arises is the issue of hallucination, where LLMs might produce content that appears plausible yet inaccurate. This issue has received limited attention within the context of TCM research, leaving a significant gap in understanding how hallucination manifests within the unique theoretical frameworks and diagnostic principles. Motivated by this phenomenon, we present TCMPHal, the first dataset specifically curated for hallucination detection in TCM pharmacy, comprising 10,000 high-quality question-answer pairs with hallucination annotations. Our experimental results across diverse LLMs, under standard, knowledge-based, and search engine-augmented conditions, demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of these models. A notable observation is that, for thinking LLMs, incorporating search engine results yields minimal improvement over their intrinsic reasoning abilities. We further conduct an in-depth error analysis, paving the way for future research directions in this domain. We release the TCMPHal dataset at https://github.com/hanninaa/TCMP.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.lrec-1.552
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- Palma de Mallorca, Spain
- Editors:
- Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA Language Resource Association
- Note:
- Pages:
- 6939–6948
- Language:
- External URL:
- https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-552
- DOI:
- 10.63317/2889b9sdvrsm
- Cite (ACL):
- Nijia Han, Zimu Wang, Ziwen Xie, Wei Wang, Jia Meng, John Moraros, and Shuihua Wang. 2026. TCMPHal: A Large-scale Dataset for Hallucination Detection in Traditional Chinese Medicine Pharmacy. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6939–6948, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
- Cite (Informal):
- TCMPHal: A Large-scale Dataset for Hallucination Detection in Traditional Chinese Medicine Pharmacy (Han et al., LREC 2026)