Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Qian, Haosheng, Fan, Yixing, Zhang, Ruqing, Guo, Jiafeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11217
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913547266555904
author Qian, Haosheng
Fan, Yixing
Zhang, Ruqing
Guo, Jiafeng
author_facet Qian, Haosheng
Fan, Yixing
Zhang, Ruqing
Guo, Jiafeng
contents Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) appears as a promising method to alleviate the "hallucination" problem in large language models (LLMs), since it can incorporate external traceable resources for response generation. The essence of RAG in combating the hallucination issue lies in accurately attributing claims in responses to the corresponding retrieved documents. However, most of existing works focus on improving the quality of generated responses from the LLM, while largely overlooked its ability to attribute sources accurately. In this study, we conduct a systematic analysis about the capabilities of LLMs in generating citations within response generation, and further introduce a novel method to enhance their citation generation abilities. Specifically, we evaluate both the correctness and citation quality for seven widely-used LLMs on two benchmark datasets. Meanwhile, we introduce new citation evaluation metrics to eliminate the over-penalization of unnecessary and excessive citations in existing metrics. Furthermore, we propose a Generate-then-Refine method that completes relevant citations and removes irrelevant ones without altering the response text. The results on WebGLM-QA, ASQA and ELI5 datasets show that our method substantially improves the quality of citations in responses generated by LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_11217
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Capacity of Citation Generation by Large Language Models
Qian, Haosheng
Fan, Yixing
Zhang, Ruqing
Guo, Jiafeng
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) appears as a promising method to alleviate the "hallucination" problem in large language models (LLMs), since it can incorporate external traceable resources for response generation. The essence of RAG in combating the hallucination issue lies in accurately attributing claims in responses to the corresponding retrieved documents. However, most of existing works focus on improving the quality of generated responses from the LLM, while largely overlooked its ability to attribute sources accurately. In this study, we conduct a systematic analysis about the capabilities of LLMs in generating citations within response generation, and further introduce a novel method to enhance their citation generation abilities. Specifically, we evaluate both the correctness and citation quality for seven widely-used LLMs on two benchmark datasets. Meanwhile, we introduce new citation evaluation metrics to eliminate the over-penalization of unnecessary and excessive citations in existing metrics. Furthermore, we propose a Generate-then-Refine method that completes relevant citations and removes irrelevant ones without altering the response text. The results on WebGLM-QA, ASQA and ELI5 datasets show that our method substantially improves the quality of citations in responses generated by LLMs.
title On the Capacity of Citation Generation by Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11217