Papers › Evaluating Factual Consistency of Summaries with Large Language Models

Evaluating Factual Consistency of Summaries with Large Language Models

23 May 2023arXiv:2305.14069archive 2025-07-28

Shiqi Chen, Siyang Gao, Junxian He

Detecting factual errors in summaries has been an important and challenging subject in summarization research. Inspired by the emergent ability of large language models (LLMs), we explore evaluating factual consistency of summaries by directly prompting LLMs. We present a comprehensive empirical study to assess the ability of LLMs as factual consistency evaluators, which consists of (1) analyzing different LLMs such as the GPT model series and Flan-T5; (2) investigating a variety of prompting methods including vanilla prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and a sentence-by-sentence prompting method to tackle long summaries; and (3) evaluating on diverse summaries generated by multiple summarization systems, ranging from pre-transformer methods to SOTA pretrained models. Our experiments demonstrate that prompting LLMs is able to outperform the previous best factuality systems in all settings, by up to 12.2 absolute points in terms of the binary classification accuracy on inconsistency detection.

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hkust-nlp/llmeval_sum_factual officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report
sjtu-lit/llmeval_sum_factual officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

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Binary ClassificationSentence

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDiscriminative Fine-TuningDropoutGPTLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight Decay

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