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Enterprise retrieval augmented generation (RAG) offers a highly flexible framework for combining powerful large language models (LLMs) with internal, possibly temporally changing, documents. In RAG, documents are first chunked. Relevant chunks are then retrieved for a user query, which are passed as context to a synthesizer LLM to generate the query response. However, the retrieval step can limit performance, as incorrect chunks can lead the synthesizer LLM to generate a false response. This work applies a zero-shot adaptation of standard dense retrieval steps for more accurate chunk recall. Specifically, a chunk is first decomposed into atomic statements. A set of synthetic questions are then generated on these atoms (with the chunk as the context). Dense retrieval involves finding the closest set of synthetic questions, and associated chunks, to the user query. It is found that retrieval with the atoms leads to higher recall than retrieval with chunks. Further performance gain is observed with retrieval using the synthetic questions generated over the atoms. Higher recall at the retrieval step enables higher performance of the enterprise LLM using the RAG pipeline.

EMNLP 2024

Question-Based Retrieval using Atomic Units for Enterprise RAG

question generation

retrieval

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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With the advent of social media networks and the vast amount of information circulating through them, automatic fact verification is an essential component to prevent the spread of misinformation. It is even more useful to have fact verification systems that provide explanations along with their classifications to ensure accurate predictions. To address both of these requirements, we implement AMREx, an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR)-based veracity prediction and explanation system for fact verification using a combination of Smatch, an AMR evaluation metric to measure meaning containment and textual similarity, and demonstrate its effectiveness in producing partially explainable justifications using two community standard fact verification datasets, FEVER and AVeriTeC. AMREx surpasses the AVeriTec baseline accuracy showing the effectiveness of our approach for real-world claim verification. It follows an interpretable pipeline and returns an explainable AMR node mapping to clarify the system's veracity predictions when applicable. We further demonstrate that AMREx output can be used to prompt LLMs to generate natural-language explanations using the AMR mappings as a guide to lessen the probability of hallucinations.

AMREx: AMR for Explainable Fact Verification

The rising threat of disinformation underscores the need to fully or partially automate the fact-checking process. Identifying text segments requiring fact-checking is known as \emph{claim detection} (CD) and \emph{claim check-worthiness detection} (CW), the latter incorporating complex domain-specific criteria of worthiness and often framed as a ranking task. Zero- and few-shot LLM prompting is an attractive option for both tasks, as it bypasses the need for labeled datasets and allows verbalized claim and worthiness criteria to be directly used for prompting. We evaluate the LLMs' predictive accuracy on five CD/CW datasets from diverse domains, using corresponding annotation guidelines in prompts. We examine two key aspects: (1) how to best distill factuality and worthiness criteria into a prompt, and (2) how much context to provide for each claim. To this end, we experiment with different levels of prompt verbosity and varying amounts of contextual information given to the model. We additionally evaluate the top-performing models with ranking metrics, resembling prioritization done by fact-checkers. Our results show that optimal prompt verbosity varies, meta-data alone adds more performance boost than co-text, and confidence scores can be directly used to produce reliable check-worthiness rankings.

Claim Check-Worthiness Detection: How Well do LLMs Grasp Annotation Guidelines?

Recent work on fact-checking addresses a realistic setting where models incorporate evidence retrieved from the web to decide the veracity of claims. A bottleneck in this pipeline is in retrieving relevant evidence: traditional methods may surface documents directly related to a claim, but fact-checking complex claims requires more inferences. For instance, a document about how a vaccine was developed is relevant to addressing claims about what it might contain, even if it does not address them directly. We present a Contrastive Fact-Checking Reranker (CFR), an improved retriever for this setting. By leveraging the AVeriTeC dataset, which annotates subquestions for claims with human written answers from evidence documents, we fine-tune Contriever with a contrastive objective based on multiple training signals, including distillation from GPT-4, evaluating subquestion answers, and gold labels in the dataset. We evaluate our model on both retrieval and end-to-end veracity judgments about claims. On the AVeriTeC dataset, we find a 6% improvement in veracity classification accuracy. We also show our gains can be transferred to FEVER, ClaimDecomp, HotpotQA, and a synthetic dataset requiring retrievers to make inferences.

Contrastive Learning to Improve Retrieval for Real-World Fact Checking

The escalating challenge of misinformation, particularly in political discourse, requires advanced fact-checking solutions; this is even clearer in the more complex scenario of multimodal claims. We tackle this issue using a multimodal large language model in conjunction with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and introduce two novel reasoning techniques: Chain of RAG (CoRAG) and Tree of RAG (ToRAG). They fact-check multimodal claims by extracting both textual and image content, retrieving external information, and reasoning subsequent questions to be answered based on prior evidence. We achieve a weighted F1-score of 0.85, surpassing a baseline reasoning technique by 0.14 points. Human evaluation confirms that the vast majority of our generated fact-check explanations contain all information from gold standard data.

RAGAR, Your Falsehood Radar: RAG-Augmented Reasoning for Political Fact-Checking using Multimodal Large Language Models

Fact-checking is a critical NLP task aimed at verifying the truthfulness of claims based on evidence and current approaches are labor-intensive and document-centric. FactGenius introduces a novel approach by combining zero-shot prompting of large language models (LLMs) with fuzzy relation mining on Knowledge Graphs (KGs) for fact-checking.

FactGenius: Combining Zero-Shot Prompting and Fuzzy Relation Mining to Improve Fact Verification with Knowledge Graphs

Despite recent success in natural language processing (NLP), fact verification remains a difficult task. Due to misinformation spreading increasingly fast, attention has been directed towards automatically verifying the correctness of claims. In the domain of NLP, this is usually done by training supervised machine learning models to verify claims by utilizing evidence from trustworthy corpora. \textbf{We present efficient methods for verifying claims on a dataset where the evidence is in the form of structured knowledge graphs.} We use the \textsc{FactKG} dataset, which is constructed from the \emph{DBpedia} knowledge graph extracted from Wikipedia. By simplifying the evidence retrieval process, from fine-tuned language models to simple logical retrievals, \textbf{we are able to construct models that both require less computational resources and achieve better test-set accuracy.

Fact or Fiction? Improving Fact Verification with Knowledge Graphs through Simplified Subgraph Retrievals

Contradiction retrieval refers to identifying and extracting documents that explicitly disagree with or refute the content of a query, which is important to many downstream applications like fact checking and data cleaning. To retrieve contradiction argument to the query from large document corpora, existing methods such as similarity search and crossencoder models exhibit significant limitations. The former struggles to capture the essence of contradiction due to its inherent nature of favoring similarity, while the latter suffers from computational inefficiency, especially when the size of corpora is large. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach: \name~that leverages specially trained sentence embeddings designed to preserve subtle, contradictory nuances between sentences. Our method utilizes a combined metric of cosine similarity and a sparsity function to efficiently identify and retrieve documents that contradict a given query. This approach dramatically enhances the speed of contradiction detection by reducing the need for exhaustive document comparisons to simple vector calculations. We validate our model using the Arguana dataset, a benchmark dataset specifically geared towards contradiction retrieval, as well as synthetic contradictions generated from the MSMARCO and HotpotQA datasets using GPT-4. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach not only in contradiction retrieval with more than 30% accuracy improvements on MSMARCO and HotpotQA across different model architectures but also in applications such as cleaning corrupted corpora to restore high-quality QA retrieval. This paper outlines a promising direction for improving the accuracy and efficiency of contradiction retrieval in large-scale text corpora.

SparseCL: Sparse Contrastive Learning for Contradiction Retrieval

Training automatic summary fact verifiers often faces the challenge of a lack of human-labeled data. Our experimental results reveal that the model trained on extensive LLM-generated datasets surpasses that trained on smaller human-annotated datasets when evaluated using human-generated test sets. Fine-tuning fact verification models with LLM feedback can be more effective and cost-efficient than human feedback.

Learning to Verify Summary Facts with Fine-Grained LLM Feedback

We introduce \textbf{DAHL}, a benchmark dataset and automated evaluation system designed to assess hallucination in long-form text generation, specifically within the biomedical domain. Our benchmark dataset, meticulously curated from biomedical research papers, consists of 8,573 questions across 29 categories. DAHL evaluates fact-conflicting hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by deconstructing responses into atomic units, each representing a single piece of information. The accuracy of these responses is averaged to produce the \textit{DAHL Score}, offering a more in-depth evaluation of hallucinations compared to previous methods that rely on multiple-choice tasks. We conduct experiments with 8 different models, finding that larger models tend to hallucinate less; however, beyond a model size of 7 to 8 billion parameters, further scaling does not significantly improve factual accuracy. The \textit{DAHL Score} holds potential as an efficient alternative to human-annotated preference labels, being able to be expanded to other specialized domains. We release the dataset and code in [https://github.com/seemdog/DAHL].

DAHL: Domain-specific Automated Hallucination Evaluation of Long-Form Text through a Benchmark Dataset in Biomedicine

Tables play a crucial role in conveying information in various domains. We propose a Plan-then-Reason framework to answer different types of user queries over tables with sentence context. The framework first plans the reasoning paths over the context, then assigns each step to program-based or textual reasoning to reach the final answer. This framework enhances the table reasoning abilities for both in-context learning and fine-tuning methods. GPT-3.5-Turbo following Plan-then-Reason framework surpasses other prompting baselines without self-consistency while using less API calls and in-context demonstrations. We also construct an instruction tuning set TrixInstruct to evaluate the effectiveness of fine-tuning with this framework. We present ProTrix model family by finetuning models on TrixInstruct. Our experiments show that ProTrix family generalizes to diverse unseen tabular tasks with only 6k training instances. We further demonstrate that ProTrix can generate accurate and faithful explanations to answer complex free-form questions. Our work underscores the importance of the planning and reasoning abilities towards a model over tabular tasks with generalizability and interpretability. We will open-source our dataset and models.

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