Self-contradictory Hallucinations of Large Language Models: Evaluation, Detection and Mitigation

Large language models (large LMs) are susceptible to producing text that contains hallucinated content. An important instance of this problem is self-contradiction, where the LM generates two contradictory sentences within the same context. In this work, we present a comprehensive investigation into self-contradiction for various instruction-tuned LMs, covering evaluation, detection, and mitigation. Our analysis reveals the prevalence of self-contradictions when LMs generate text for open-domain topics, e.g., in 17.7% of all sentences produced by ChatGPT. Self-contradiction also complements retrieval-based methods, as a large portion of them (e.g., 35.8% for ChatGPT) cannot be verified using Wikipedia. We then propose a novel prompting-based framework designed to effectively detect and mitigate self-contradictions. Our detector achieves high accuracy, e.g., around 80% F1 score when prompting ChatGPT. The mitigation algorithm iteratively refines the generated text to remove contradictory information while preserving text fluency and informativeness. Importantly, our entire framework is applicable to black-box LMs and does not require external grounded knowledge. Our approach is practically effective and has been released as a push-button tool to benefit the public, available at https://chatprotect.ai/.