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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jafari, Nazanin, Allan, James, Iyyer, Mohit
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03141
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author Jafari, Nazanin
Allan, James
Iyyer, Mohit
author_facet Jafari, Nazanin
Allan, James
Iyyer, Mohit
contents Evaluating the factuality of long-form output generated by large language models (LLMs) remains challenging, particularly when responses are open-ended and contain many fine-grained factual statements. Existing evaluation methods primarily focus on precision: they decompose a response into atomic claims and verify each claim against external knowledge sources such as Wikipedia. However, this overlooks an equally important dimension of factuality: recall, whether the generated response covers the relevant facts that should be included. We propose a comprehensive factuality evaluation framework that jointly measures precision and recall. Our method leverages external knowledge sources to construct reference facts and determine whether they are captured in generated text. We further introduce an importance-aware weighting scheme based on relevance and salience. Our analysis reveals that current LLMs perform substantially better on precision than on recall, suggesting that factual incompleteness remains a major limitation of long-form generation and that models are generally better at covering highly important facts than the full set of relevant facts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_03141
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Precision: Importance-Aware Recall for Factuality Evaluation in Long-Form LLM Generation
Jafari, Nazanin
Allan, James
Iyyer, Mohit
Computation and Language
Evaluating the factuality of long-form output generated by large language models (LLMs) remains challenging, particularly when responses are open-ended and contain many fine-grained factual statements. Existing evaluation methods primarily focus on precision: they decompose a response into atomic claims and verify each claim against external knowledge sources such as Wikipedia. However, this overlooks an equally important dimension of factuality: recall, whether the generated response covers the relevant facts that should be included. We propose a comprehensive factuality evaluation framework that jointly measures precision and recall. Our method leverages external knowledge sources to construct reference facts and determine whether they are captured in generated text. We further introduce an importance-aware weighting scheme based on relevance and salience. Our analysis reveals that current LLMs perform substantially better on precision than on recall, suggesting that factual incompleteness remains a major limitation of long-form generation and that models are generally better at covering highly important facts than the full set of relevant facts.
title Beyond Precision: Importance-Aware Recall for Factuality Evaluation in Long-Form LLM Generation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03141