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SymGen: Towards verifiable text generation with symbolic references (arxiv.org)
1 point by hhs on Oct 24, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: The system makes an AI writer tag its answer with pointers to source-data fields it drew from, so a checker can see where every claim came from. In a human study, people verified the text faster while it stayed fluent and accurate.

Abstract · Towards Verifiable Text Generation with Symbolic References

LLMs are vulnerable to hallucinations, and thus their outputs generally require laborious human verification for high-stakes applications. To this end, we propose symbolically grounded generation (SymGen) as a simple approach for enabling easier manual validation of an LLM's output. SymGen prompts an LLM to interleave its regular output text with explicit symbolic references to fields present in some conditioning data (e.g., a table in JSON format). The references can be used to display the provenance of different spans of text in the generation, reducing the effort required for manual verification. Across a range of data-to-text and question-answering experiments, we find that LLMs are able to directly output text that makes use of accurate symbolic references while maintaining fluency and factuality. In a human study we further find that such annotations can streamline human verification of machine-generated text. Our code will be available at http://symgen.github.io.

Lucas Torroba Hennigen, Shannon Shen, Aniruddha Nrusimha, Bernhard Gapp, David Sontag, Yoon Kim
arXiv:2311.09188 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Nov 15, 2023 · updated Apr 15, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 57 pages, 8 figures, 8 tables

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