NLP_CIMAT at SemEval-2025 Task 3: Just Ask GPT or look Inside. A prompt and Neural Networks Approach to Hallucination Detection

Jaime Stack - Sánchez, Miguel Alvarez - Carmona, Adrian Pastor Lopez Monroy


Abstract
This paper presents NLP_CIMAT’s participation in SemEval-2025 Task 3, which focuses on hallucination detection in large language models (LLMs) at character level across multiple languages. Hallucinations—outputs that are coherent and well-formed but contain inaccurate or fabricated information—pose significant challenges in real-world NLP applications. We explore two primary approaches: (1) a prompt-based method that leverages LLMs’ own reasoning capabilities and knowledge, with and without external knowledge through a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-like framework, and (2) a neural network approach that utilizes the hidden states of a LLM to predict hallucinated tokens. We analyze various factors in the neural approach, such as multilingual training, informing about the language, and hidden state selection. Our findings highlight that incorporating external information, like wikipedia articles, improves hallucination detection, particularly for smaller LLMs. Moreover, our best prompt-based technique secured second place in the Spanish category, demonstrating the effectiveness of in-context learning for this task.
Anthology ID:
2025.semeval-1.221
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Sara Rosenthal, Aiala Rosá, Debanjan Ghosh, Marcos Zampieri
Venues:
SemEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1683–1689
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.semeval-1.221/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jaime Stack - Sánchez, Miguel Alvarez - Carmona, and Adrian Pastor Lopez Monroy. 2025. NLP_CIMAT at SemEval-2025 Task 3: Just Ask GPT or look Inside. A prompt and Neural Networks Approach to Hallucination Detection. In Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), pages 1683–1689, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NLP_CIMAT at SemEval-2025 Task 3: Just Ask GPT or look Inside. A prompt and Neural Networks Approach to Hallucination Detection (Stack - Sánchez et al., SemEval 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.semeval-1.221.pdf