Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Huang, Heyuan, DeLucia, Alexandra, Tiyyala, Vijay Murari, Dredze, Mark
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18452
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908601123078144
author Huang, Heyuan
DeLucia, Alexandra
Tiyyala, Vijay Murari
Dredze, Mark
author_facet Huang, Heyuan
DeLucia, Alexandra
Tiyyala, Vijay Murari
Dredze, Mark
contents While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate fluent and convincing responses, they are not necessarily correct. This is especially apparent in the popular decompose-then-verify factuality evaluation pipeline, where LLMs evaluate generations by decomposing the generations into individual, valid claims. Factuality evaluation is especially important for medical answers, since incorrect medical information could seriously harm the patient. However, existing factuality systems are a poor match for the medical domain, as they are typically only evaluated on objective, entity-centric, formulaic texts such as biographies and historical topics. This differs from condition-dependent, conversational, hypothetical, sentence-structure diverse, and subjective medical answers, which makes decomposition into valid facts challenging. We propose MedScore, a new pipeline to decompose medical answers into condition-aware valid facts and verify against in-domain corpora. Our method extracts up to three times more valid facts than existing methods, reducing hallucination and vague references, and retaining condition-dependency in facts. The resulting factuality score substantially varies by decomposition method, verification corpus, and used backbone LLM, highlighting the importance of customizing each step for reliable factuality evaluation by using our generalizable and modularized pipeline for domain adaptation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_18452
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MedScore: Generalizable Factuality Evaluation of Free-Form Medical Answers by Domain-adapted Claim Decomposition and Verification
Huang, Heyuan
DeLucia, Alexandra
Tiyyala, Vijay Murari
Dredze, Mark
Computation and Language
While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate fluent and convincing responses, they are not necessarily correct. This is especially apparent in the popular decompose-then-verify factuality evaluation pipeline, where LLMs evaluate generations by decomposing the generations into individual, valid claims. Factuality evaluation is especially important for medical answers, since incorrect medical information could seriously harm the patient. However, existing factuality systems are a poor match for the medical domain, as they are typically only evaluated on objective, entity-centric, formulaic texts such as biographies and historical topics. This differs from condition-dependent, conversational, hypothetical, sentence-structure diverse, and subjective medical answers, which makes decomposition into valid facts challenging. We propose MedScore, a new pipeline to decompose medical answers into condition-aware valid facts and verify against in-domain corpora. Our method extracts up to three times more valid facts than existing methods, reducing hallucination and vague references, and retaining condition-dependency in facts. The resulting factuality score substantially varies by decomposition method, verification corpus, and used backbone LLM, highlighting the importance of customizing each step for reliable factuality evaluation by using our generalizable and modularized pipeline for domain adaptation.
title MedScore: Generalizable Factuality Evaluation of Free-Form Medical Answers by Domain-adapted Claim Decomposition and Verification
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18452