Converge to the Truth: Factual Error Correction via Iterative Constrained Editing

Given a claim and retrieved evidence texts, VENCE iteratively corrects the claim by claim masking and correction proposal.

Abstract

Given a possibly false claim sentence, how can we automatically correct it with minimal editing? Existing methods either require a large number of pairs of false and corrected claims for supervised training or do not handle well errors spanning over multiple tokens within an utterance. In this paper, we propose VENCE, a novel method for factual error correction (FEC) with minimal edits. VENCE formulates the FEC problem as iterative sampling editing actions with respect to a target density function. We carefully design the target function with predicted truthfulness scores from an offline trained fact verification model. VENCE samples the most probable editing positions based on back-calculated gradients of the truthfulness score concerning input tokens and the editing actions using a distantly-supervised language model (T5). Experiments on a public dataset show that VENCE improves the well-adopted SARI metric by 5.3 (or a relative improvement of 11.8%) over the previous best distantly-supervised methods.

Type
Publication
In The 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023)
Jiangjie Chen
Jiangjie Chen
Researcher

His research interests mainly include large models and their reasoning and planning abilities.