Document Attribution: Examining Citation Relationships using Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rawte, Vipula, Rossi, Ryan A., Dernoncourt, Franck, Lipka, Nedim
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Rawte, Vipula
Rossi, Ryan A.
Dernoncourt, Franck
Lipka, Nedim
author_facet Rawte, Vipula
Rossi, Ryan A.
Dernoncourt, Franck
Lipka, Nedim
contents As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to document-based tasks - such as document summarization, question answering, and information extraction - where user requirements focus on retrieving information from provided documents rather than relying on the model's parametric knowledge, ensuring the trustworthiness and interpretability of these systems has become a critical concern. A central approach to addressing this challenge is attribution, which involves tracing the generated outputs back to their source documents. However, since LLMs can produce inaccurate or imprecise responses, it is crucial to assess the reliability of these citations. To tackle this, our work proposes two techniques. (1) A zero-shot approach that frames attribution as a straightforward textual entailment task. Our method using flan-ul2 demonstrates an improvement of 0.27% and 2.4% over the best baseline of ID and OOD sets of AttributionBench, respectively. (2) We also explore the role of the attention mechanism in enhancing the attribution process. Using a smaller LLM, flan-t5-small, the F1 scores outperform the baseline across almost all layers except layer 4 and layers 8 through 11.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_06324
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Document Attribution: Examining Citation Relationships using Large Language Models
Rawte, Vipula
Rossi, Ryan A.
Dernoncourt, Franck
Lipka, Nedim
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to document-based tasks - such as document summarization, question answering, and information extraction - where user requirements focus on retrieving information from provided documents rather than relying on the model's parametric knowledge, ensuring the trustworthiness and interpretability of these systems has become a critical concern. A central approach to addressing this challenge is attribution, which involves tracing the generated outputs back to their source documents. However, since LLMs can produce inaccurate or imprecise responses, it is crucial to assess the reliability of these citations. To tackle this, our work proposes two techniques. (1) A zero-shot approach that frames attribution as a straightforward textual entailment task. Our method using flan-ul2 demonstrates an improvement of 0.27% and 2.4% over the best baseline of ID and OOD sets of AttributionBench, respectively. (2) We also explore the role of the attention mechanism in enhancing the attribution process. Using a smaller LLM, flan-t5-small, the F1 scores outperform the baseline across almost all layers except layer 4 and layers 8 through 11.
title Document Attribution: Examining Citation Relationships using Large Language Models
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06324