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Attribute or Abstain: Large Language Models as Long Document Assistants

Buchmann, Jan ; Liu, Xiao ; Gurevych, Iryna
eds.: Al-Onaizan, Yaser ; Bansal, Mohit ; Chen, Yun-Nung (2024)
Attribute or Abstain: Large Language Models as Long Document Assistants.
The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Miami, Florida (12.11.2024-16.11.2024)
doi: 10.26083/tuprints-00028921
Conference or Workshop Item, Secondary publication, Publisher's Version

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Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
Type of entry: Secondary publication
Title: Attribute or Abstain: Large Language Models as Long Document Assistants
Language: English
Date: 17 December 2024
Place of Publication: Darmstadt
Year of primary publication: November 2024
Place of primary publication: Kerrville, TX, USA
Publisher: ACL
Book Title: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Event Title: The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Event Location: Miami, Florida
Event Dates: 12.11.2024-16.11.2024
DOI: 10.26083/tuprints-00028921
Corresponding Links:
Origin: Secondary publication service
Abstract:

LLMs can help humans working with long documents, but are known to hallucinate. Attribution can increase trust in LLM responses: The LLM provides evidence that supports its response, which enhances verifiability. Existing approaches to attribution have only been evaluated in RAG settings, where the initial retrieval confounds LLM performance. This is crucially different from the long document setting, where retrieval is not needed, but could help. Thus, a long document specific evaluation of attribution is missing. To fill this gap, we present LAB, a benchmark of 6 diverse long document tasks with attribution, and experiments with different approaches to attribution on 5 LLMs of different sizes. We find that citation, i.e. response generation and evidence extraction in one step, performs best for large and fine-tuned models, while additional retrieval can help for small, prompted models. We investigate whether the "Lost in the Middle" phenomenon exists for attribution, but do not find this. We also find that evidence quality can predict response quality on datasets with simple responses, but not so for complex responses, as models struggle with providing evidence for complex claims. We release code and data for further investigation.

Status: Publisher's Version
URN: urn:nbn:de:tuda-tuprints-289216
Classification DDC: 000 Generalities, computers, information > 004 Computer science
Divisions: 20 Department of Computer Science > Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing
Zentrale Einrichtungen > hessian.AI - The Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence
Date Deposited: 17 Dec 2024 16:29
Last Modified: 17 Dec 2024 16:29
URI: https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/id/eprint/28921
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