EMNLP Findings2023
WikiChat: Stopping the Hallucination of Large Language Model Chatbots by Few-Shot Grounding on Wikipedia
Sina J. Semnani, Violet Z. Yao, Heidi C. Zhang, Monica S. Lam
Abstract
This paper presents the first few-shot LLMbased chatbot that almost never hallucinates and has high conversationality and low latency. WikiChat is grounded on the English Wikipedia, the largest curated free-text corpus.
WikiChat generates a response from an LLM, retains only the grounded facts, and combines them with additional information it retrieves from the corpus to form factual and engaging responses. We distill WikiChat based on GPT-4 into a 7B-parameter LLaMA model with minimal loss of quality, to significantly improve its latency, cost and privacy, and facilitate research and deployment 1 .
Using a novel hybrid human-and-LLM evaluation methodology, we show that our best system achieves 97.3% factual accuracy in simulated conversations. It significantly outperforms all retrieval-based and LLM-based baselines, and by 3.9%, 38.6% and 51.0% on head, tail and recent knowledge compared to GPT-4. Compared to previous state-of-the-art retrieval-based chatbots, WikiChat is also significantly more informative and engaging, just like an LLM. WikiChat achieves 97.9% factual accuracy in conversations with human users about recent topics, 55.0% better than GPT-4, while receiving significantly higher user ratings and more favorable comments. User: Have you heard about the upcoming film Oppenheimer? WikiChat: Yes! Oppenheimer is a biopic … User: What do you think about the casting? Query: cast of Oppenheimer Christopher Nolan film Date: "recent" Title: Christopher Nolan Nolan's twelfth directorial venture will be "Oppenheimer" (2023), … Title: Oppenheimer (film) … Much of the main cast signed on between September 2021 and April 2022., … Title: Cillian Murphy … Murphy was confirmed to star as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Nolan's upcoming film Oppenheimer … Christopher Nolan is known for his meticulous casting choices. He often casts well-known actors in his films, and this time he has selected Tom Hanks and … Michael Caine.
• Christopher Nolan is known for his meticulous casting choices.
• Christopher Nolan often casts well-known actors in his films.
• Tom Hanks stars in the Oppenheimer (2023) movie.
• Michael Caine stars in the Oppenheimer (2023) movie.
• Much of the Oppenheimer (2023) movie's cast signed on between September 2021 and April 2022.
• Cilian Murphy is to play as Robert Oppenheimer in the Oppenherimer (2023) movie.
• Christopher Nolan is known for his meticulous casting choices.
• Christopher Nolan often casts well-known actors in his films.
Cillian Murphy has been cast to play Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" movie. Christopher Nolan is known for his meticulous casting choices and often casts well-known actors in his films. The movie's cast was signed on between September 2021 and April 2022.
Christopher Nolan has cast Cillian Murphy as the titular role of Oppenheimer, keeping with his tradition of meticulous casting choices. I'm sure it will be an excellent film!
Ask Lune
Ask anything. The answer quotes the paper.
Lune reads all of it and the papers around it, then shows you the passages behind every answer.
Lune answers from
the full paper · 15 top-tier papers that cite it · related work
Free to start. No credit card required.
Cited by top-tier papers15
- Language Models with Conformal Factuality GuaranteesChristopher Mohri, Tatsunori HashimotoICML 2024 · 107 citations
- Unified Hallucination Detection for Multimodal Large Language ModelsXiang Chen, Chenxi Wang, Yida Xue, Ningyu Zhang et al.ACL 2024 · 20 citations
- ANAH-v2: Scaling Analytical Hallucination Annotation of Large Language ModelsYuzhe Gu, Ziwei Ji, Wenwei Zhang, Chengqi Lyu et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 20 citations
- WebANNS: Fast and Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in Web BrowsersMugeng Liu, Siqi Zhong, Qi Yang, Yudong Han et al.SIGIR 2025 · 4 citations
- Enhancing LLM's Cognition via StructurizationKai Liu, Zhihang Fu, Chao Chen, Wei Zhang et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 3 citations
Builds on26
- Language Models are Few-Shot LearnersTom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah et al.NeurIPS 2020 · 64,255 citations
- Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language ModelsJason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 22,562 citations
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP TasksPatrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, Aleksandra Piktus, Fabio Petroni et al.NeurIPS 2020 · 19,162 citations
- FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-AwarenessTri Dao, Daniel Y. Fu, Stefano Ermon, Atri Rudra et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 5,493 citations
- Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-FeedbackAman Madaan, Niket Tandon, Prakhar Gupta, Skyler Hallinan et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 4,972 citations
Related papers
- FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text GenerationSewon Min, Kalpesh Krishna, Xinxi Lyu, Mike Lewis et al.EMNLP 2023 · 225 citations
- Fine-tuned LLMs Know More, Hallucinate Less with Few-Shot Sequence-to-Sequence Semantic Parsing over WikidataSilei Xu, Shicheng Liu, Theo Culhane, Elizaveta Pertseva et al.EMNLP 2023 · 10 citations
- Instruction-tuned Language Models are Better Knowledge LearnersZhengbao Jiang, Zhiqing Sun, Weijia Shi, Pedro Rodríguez et al.ACL 2024 · 11 citations
- FreshLLMs: Refreshing Large Language Models with Search Engine AugmentationTu Vu, Mohit Iyyer, Xuezhi Wang, Noah Constant et al.ACL Findings 2024 · 73 citations
- LLaMA-Omni 2: LLM-based Real-time Spoken Chatbot with Autoregressive Streaming Speech SynthesisQingkai Fang, Yan Zhou, Shoutao Guo, Shaolei Zhang et al.ACL 2025
