This paper introduces the task of factual error correction: performing edits to a claim so that the generated rewrite is better supported by evidence. This extends the well-studied task of fact verification by providing a mechanism to correct written texts that are refuted or only partially supported by evidence. We demonstrate that it is feasible to train factual error correction systems from existing fact checking datasets which only contain labeled claims accompanied by evidence, but not the correction. We achieve this by employing a two-stage distant supervision approach that incorporates evidence into masked claims when generating corrections. Our approach, based on the T5 transformer and using retrieved evidence, achieved better results than existing work which used a pointer copy network and gold evidence, producing accurate factual error corrections for 5x more instances in human evaluation and a .125 increase in SARI score. The evaluation is conducted on a dataset of 65,000 instances based on a recent fact verification shared task and we release it to enable further work on the task.
Neural abstractive summarization systems have achieved promising progress, thanks to the availability of large-scale datasets and models pre-trained with self-supervised methods. However, ensuring the factual consistency of the generated summaries for abstractive summarization systems is a challenge. We propose a post-editing corrector module to address this issue by identifying and correcting factual errors in generated summaries. The neural corrector model is pre-trained on artificial examples that are created by applying a series of heuristic transformations on reference summaries. These tr…
This paper introduces the task of factual error correction: performing edits to a claim so that the generated rewrite is better supported by evidence. This extends the well-studied task of fact verification by providing a mechanism to correct written texts that are refuted or only partially supported by evidence. We demonstrate that it is feasible to train factual error correction systems from existing fact checking datasets which only contain labeled claims accompanied by evidence, but not the correction. We achieve this by employing a two-stage distant supervision approach that incorporates …
Reference Matters: Benchmarking Factual Error Correction for Dialogue Summarization with Fine-grained Evaluation Framework
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；Center for Data Science, Peking University（北京大学数据科学中心）；The MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University（北京大学计算语言学教育部重点实验室）；Huawei Cloud（华为云）
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；AIRS Company, Hyundai Motor Group（现代汽车集团AIRS公司）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
Despite the recent advancements in abstractive summarization systems leveraged from large-scale datasets and pre-trained language models, the factual correctness of the summary is still insufficient. One line of trials to mitigate this problem is to include a post-editing process that can detect and correct factual errors in the summary. In building such a post-editing system, it is strongly required that 1) the process has a high success rate and interpretability and 2) has a fast running time. Previous approaches focus on regeneration of the summary using the autoregressive models, which lac…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Abstractive summarization models often generate inconsistent summaries containing factual errors or hallucinated content. Recent works focus on correcting factual errors in generated summaries via post-editing. Such correction models are trained using adversarial non-factual summaries constructed using heuristic rules for injecting errors. However, generating non-factual summaries using heuristics often does not generalize well to actual model errors. In this work, we propose to generate hard, representative synthetic examples of non-factual summaries through infilling language models. With th…
Prompted Zero-Shot Multi-label Classification of Factual Incorrectness in Machine-Generated Summaries
Peoples' Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University)（俄罗斯人民友谊大学）；Joint Institute for Nuclear Research（联合核研究所）；Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）；University of Skövde（舍夫德大学）
Recent pre-trained abstractive summarization systems have started to achieve credible performance, but a major barrier to their use in practice is their propensity to output summaries that are not faithful to the input and that contain factual errors. While a number of annotated datasets and statistical models for assessing factuality have been explored, there is no clear picture of what errors are most important to target or where current techniques are succeeding and failing. We explore both synthetic and human-labeled data sources for training models to identify factual errors in summarizat…
Given a possibly false claim sentence, how can we automatically correct it with minimal editing? Existing methods either require a large number of pairs of false and corrected claims for supervised training or do not handle well errors spanning over multiple tokens within an utterance. In this paper, we propose VENCE, a novel method for factual error correction (FEC) with minimal edits. VENCE formulates the FEC problem as iterative sampling editing actions with respect to a target density function. We carefully design the target function with predicted truthfulness scores from an offline train…
Despite recent progress in abstractive summarization, models often generate summaries with factual errors. Numerous approaches to detect these errors have been proposed, the most popular of which are question answering (QA)-based factuality metrics. These have been shown to work well at predicting summary-level factuality and have potential to localize errors within summaries, but this latter capability has not been systematically evaluated in past research. In this paper, we conduct the first such analysis and find that, contrary to our expectations, QA-based frameworks fail to correctly iden…
Do LVLMs Understand Charts? Analyzing and Correcting Factual Errors in Chart Captioning
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Salesforce AI Research（Salesforce AI研究院）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴达摩院）
FacTool: Factuality Detection in Generative AI -- A Tool Augmented Framework for Multi-Task and Multi-Domain Scenarios
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Meta AI；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Mila（米拉研究中心）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI Research（微软Dynamics 365人工智能研究院）
Pre-trained neural abstractive summarization systems have dominated extractive strategies on news summarization performance, at least in terms of ROUGE. However, system-generated abstractive summaries often face the pitfall of factual inconsistency: generating incorrect facts with respect to the source text. To address this challenge, we propose Span-Fact, a suite of two factual correction models that leverages knowledge learned from question answering models to make corrections in system-generated summaries via span selection. Our models employ single or multi-masking strategies to either ite…
Identifying the Achilles' Heel: An Iterative Method for Dynamically Uncovering Factual Errors in Large Language Models
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学深圳校区）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Xiaohongshu Inc.（小红书公司）；Tencent Inc.（腾讯公司）
State-of-the-art summarization models still struggle to be factually consistent with the input text. A model-agnostic way to address this problem is post-editing the generated summaries. However, existing approaches typically fail to remove entity errors if a suitable input entity replacement is not available or may insert erroneous content. In our work, we focus on removing extrinsic entity errors, or entities not in the source, to improve consistency while retaining the summary's essential information and form. We propose to use sentence-compression data to train the post-editing model to ta…
Microsoft Cognitive Services Group（微软认知服务团队）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）
Automatic abstractive summaries are found to often distort or fabricate facts in the article. This inconsistency between summary and original text has seriously impacted its applicability. We propose a fact-aware summarization model FASum to extract and integrate factual relations into the summary generation process via graph attention. We then design a factual corrector model FC to automatically correct factual errors from summaries generated by existing systems. Empirical results show that the fact-aware summarization can produce abstractive summaries with higher factual consistency compared…
E-commerce stores collect customer feedback to let sellers learn about customer concerns and enhance customer order experience. Because customer feedback often contains redundant information, a concise summary of the feedback can be generated to help sellers better understand the issues causing customer dissatisfaction. Previous state-of-the-art abstractive text summarization models make two major types of factual errors when producing summaries from customer feedback, which are wrong entity detection (WED) and incorrect product-defect description (IPD). In this work, we introduce a set of met…
Pushback in a Haystack: Language Models Respond to Factual Errors Ambiguously and Ineffectively
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）
Popular Knowledge Propagates More Errors in LLM Knowledge Updating
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；City University of New York（纽约城市大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Although existing neural network approaches have achieved great success on Chinese spelling correction, there is still room to improve. The model is required to avoid over-correction and to distinguish a correct token from its phonological and visually similar ones. In this paper, we propose an error-guided correction model (EGCM) to improve Chinese spelling correction. By borrowing the powerful ability of BERT, we propose a novel zero-shot error detection method to do a preliminary detection, which guides our model to attend more on the probably wrong tokens in encoding and to avoid modifying…
