Evaluating Correctness and Faithfulness of Instruction-Following Models for Question Answering

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Main Authors: Adlakha, Vaibhav, BehnamGhader, Parishad, Lu, Xing Han, Meade, Nicholas, Reddy, Siva
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Adlakha, Vaibhav
BehnamGhader, Parishad
Lu, Xing Han
Meade, Nicholas
Reddy, Siva
author_facet Adlakha, Vaibhav
BehnamGhader, Parishad
Lu, Xing Han
Meade, Nicholas
Reddy, Siva
contents Retriever-augmented instruction-following models are attractive alternatives to fine-tuned approaches for information-seeking tasks such as question answering (QA). By simply prepending retrieved documents in its input along with an instruction, these models can be adapted to various information domains and tasks without additional fine-tuning. While the model responses tend to be natural and fluent, the additional verbosity makes traditional QA evaluation metrics such as exact match (EM) and F1 unreliable for accurately quantifying model performance. In this work, we investigate the performance of instruction-following models across three information-seeking QA tasks. We use both automatic and human evaluation to evaluate these models along two dimensions: 1) how well they satisfy the user's information need (correctness), and 2) whether they produce a response based on the provided knowledge (faithfulness). Guided by human evaluation and analysis, we highlight the shortcomings of traditional metrics for both correctness and faithfulness. We then propose simple token-overlap based and model-based metrics that reflect the true performance of these models. Our analysis reveals that instruction-following models are competitive, and sometimes even outperform fine-tuned models for correctness. However, these models struggle to stick to the provided knowledge and often hallucinate in their responses. We hope our work encourages a more holistic evaluation of instruction-following models for QA. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/McGill-NLP/instruct-qa
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_16877
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Correctness and Faithfulness of Instruction-Following Models for Question Answering
Adlakha, Vaibhav
BehnamGhader, Parishad
Lu, Xing Han
Meade, Nicholas
Reddy, Siva
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Retriever-augmented instruction-following models are attractive alternatives to fine-tuned approaches for information-seeking tasks such as question answering (QA). By simply prepending retrieved documents in its input along with an instruction, these models can be adapted to various information domains and tasks without additional fine-tuning. While the model responses tend to be natural and fluent, the additional verbosity makes traditional QA evaluation metrics such as exact match (EM) and F1 unreliable for accurately quantifying model performance. In this work, we investigate the performance of instruction-following models across three information-seeking QA tasks. We use both automatic and human evaluation to evaluate these models along two dimensions: 1) how well they satisfy the user's information need (correctness), and 2) whether they produce a response based on the provided knowledge (faithfulness). Guided by human evaluation and analysis, we highlight the shortcomings of traditional metrics for both correctness and faithfulness. We then propose simple token-overlap based and model-based metrics that reflect the true performance of these models. Our analysis reveals that instruction-following models are competitive, and sometimes even outperform fine-tuned models for correctness. However, these models struggle to stick to the provided knowledge and often hallucinate in their responses. We hope our work encourages a more holistic evaluation of instruction-following models for QA. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/McGill-NLP/instruct-qa
title Evaluating Correctness and Faithfulness of Instruction-Following Models for Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16877