HAT: Hallucination Annotation for Translation
Rajen Chatterjee, Xintong Li, Paisarn Charoenpornsawat, Allen Lee
Abstract
Hallucinations in machine translation (MT)-outputs that may be fluent yet unfaithful to the source content-remain a critical obstacle. They hinder the reliable deployment of MT systems in real-world applications. Despite growing attention to this phenomenon, progress has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality benchmarks dedicated to hallucination detection. We introduce HAT (Hallucination Annotation for Translation), a novel dataset designed to advance research on this problem. HAT comprises 350,959 span-level annotated samples across 38 language pairs, with approximately 8,000-10,000 samples per pair partitioned into training, development, and test sets. Annotations were produced by professional translators under rigorous quality control protocols to ensure reliability. We provide a detailed analysis of hallucination distributions and establish benchmark performance using a diverse set of baselines, including automatic MT evaluation metrics as well as large language models. By providing the first large-scale, systematically annotated resource for hallucination detection in MT, HAT enables the development of more faithful translation models and lays the groundwork for future research on building trustworthy machine translation systems.
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