Identifying Factual Inconsistencies in Summaries: Grounding Model Inference via Task Taxonomy

Liyan Xu, Zhenlin Su, Mo Yu, Jin Xu, Jinho D. Choi, Jie Zhou, Fei Liu


Abstract

Factual inconsistencies pose a significant hurdle for the faithful summarization by generative models. While a major direction to enhance inconsistency detection is to derive stronger Natural Language Inference (NLI) models, we propose an orthogonal aspect that underscores the importance of incorporating task-specific taxonomy into the inference. To this end, we consolidate key error types of inconsistent facts in summaries, and incorporate them to facilitate both the zero-shot and supervised paradigms of LLMs. Extensive experiments on ten datasets of five distinct domains suggest that, zero-shot LLM inference could benefit from the explicit solution space depicted by the error type taxonomy, and achieves state-of-the-art performance overall, surpassing specialized non-LLM baselines, as well as recent LLM baselines. We further distill models that fuse the taxonomy into parameters through our designed prompt completions and supervised training strategies, efficiently substituting state-of-the-art zero-shot inference with much larger LLMs.

Venue / Year

Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP): Findings / 2024

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