Benchmarking Hallucination in Large Language Models Based on Unanswerable Math Word Problem

YuHong Sun, Zhangyue Yin, Qipeng Guo, Jiawen Wu, Xipeng Qiu, Hui Zhao


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are highly effective in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, they are susceptible to producing unreliable conjectures in ambiguous contexts called hallucination. This paper presents a new method for evaluating LLM hallucination in Question Answering (QA) based on the unanswerable math word problem (MWP). To support this approach, we innovatively develop a dataset called Unanswerable Math Word Problem (UMWP) which comprises 5200 questions across five categories. We developed an evaluation methodology combining text similarity and mathematical expression detection to determine whether LLM considers the question unanswerable. The results of extensive experiments conducted on 31 LLMs, including GPT-3, InstructGPT, LLaMA, and Claude, demonstrate that in-context learning and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) training significantly enhance the model’s ability to avoid hallucination. We show that utilizing MWP is a reliable and effective approach to assess hallucination. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Yuki-Asuuna/UMWP.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.196
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
2178–2188
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.196
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
YuHong Sun, Zhangyue Yin, Qipeng Guo, Jiawen Wu, Xipeng Qiu, and Hui Zhao. 2024. Benchmarking Hallucination in Large Language Models Based on Unanswerable Math Word Problem. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2178–2188, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Benchmarking Hallucination in Large Language Models Based on Unanswerable Math Word Problem (Sun et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.196.pdf