FABLES: Evaluating faithfulness and content selection in book-length summarization

While long-context large language models (LLMs) can technically summarize book-length documents (>100K tokens), the length and complexity of the documents have so far prohibited evaluations of input-dependent aspects like faithfulness. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale human evaluation of faithfulness and content selection on LLM-generated summaries of fictional books. Our study mitigates the issue of data contamination by focusing on summaries of books published in 2023 or 2024, and we hire annotators who have fully read each book prior to the annotation task to minimize cost and cognitive burden. We collect FABLES, a dataset of annotations on 3,158 claims made in LLM-generated summaries of 26 books, at a cost of $5.2K USD, which allows us to rank LLM summarizers based on faithfulness: Claude-3-Opus significantly outperforms all closed-source LLMs, while the open-source Mixtral is on par with GPT-3.5-Turbo. An analysis of the annotations reveals that most unfaithful claims relate to events and character states, and they generally require indirect reasoning over the narrative to invalidate. While LLM-based auto-raters have proven reliable for factuality and coherence in other settings, we implement several LLM raters of faithfulness and find that none correlates strongly with human annotations, especially with regard to detecting unfaithful claims. Our experiments suggest that detecting unfaithful claims is an important future direction not only for summarization evaluation but also as a testbed for long-context understanding. Finally, we move beyond faithfulness by exploring content selection errors in book-length summarization: we develop a typology of omission errors related to crucial narrative elements and also identify a systematic over-emphasis on events occurring towards the end of the book.

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Reviewer BatK8/10 · confidence 3/52024-05-10

Summary

This paper presents work on long-form summarization (of books), focusing on evaluating the quality of summaries generated by various LLMs. This is a well-written paper with interesting analysis. The experimental results show a lot of room for improvement in LLM summarization of books. The annotated data would also be released, providing a valuable resource for future work.

Rating

8

Confidence

3

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

- comprehensive evaluation and analysis - valuable dataset to be released to the community - provides pointers on where LLMs/long summary models could be improved

Reasons to reject

- nothing obvious

Questions to authors

- how sure are you that the annotators on UpWork had read the books carefully enough to be able to judge the quality of the summaries? - would you have any way to estimate the recall of the claim decomposition step? It seems that one of the main errors following is omission of details. Could that be related to recall of the claim extraction phase? - did I understand correctly that there is just one annotator per book? Did you consider multiple annotations per book to get a sense of agreement or estimate of the difficult of the task for humans? Typos The color names in the heading of Table 6 don't match the colors (at least for me).

Reviewer wcHx6/10 · confidence 4/52024-05-11

Summary

The paper addresses an important bottleneck in the current research of long-input undestanding and summarization: evaluation of faithfulness. The authors report a large scale human annotation experiment where summaries produced by a diverse set of SOTA models were evaluated with respect to truthfulness using established methodology (claim-level evaluation). The results showed that a substaintial portion of LLM-generated summaries have unfaithful claims. A follow-up experiment to see whether LLM-powered methods could match human-level faithfulness detection indicated a major shortcoming of such methods: it appears that all automatic methods tend to always evaluate summaries as faithful. The authors observe that often unfaithfulness errors require multi-hop reasoning to identify. In addition to the main results, the paper also provides examination of the types of content errors that automatic summaries contain. Specfically, one frequent error is omission of essential information. The authors promise to release the dataset of annotations.

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

- Addresses a very pressing problem in the current research on long-input summarization. - Explores a diversity of methods for automatic evaluation. - Evaluates a good diversity of SOTA summarization model. - Dataset of human annotations, performed with a clean methodology.

Reasons to reject

- A more in-depth analysis of where and why the automatic evaluation methods fail would be welcome. One valuable insight is that unfaithful claims often require multi-hop reasoning to be detected: it would useful to estimate the percentage of cases where this is the case. The authors note themselves that the sample size of unfaithful claims is very small -- so it would probably be possible to even do the in-depth analysis manually.

Reviewer AyeL6/10 · confidence 4/52024-05-15

Summary

The paper presents a new dataset for evaluating faithfulness and content selection in book-length summarization. The annotations are collected from Upwork platform and are based on summaries generated by five different LLMs: GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, GPT-4-Turbo, Mixtral, Claude-3-Opus. The authors compare the human annotations results with several LLM-based auto-raters, and show that non of them correlates strongly with human annotations. The authors also develop a typology that includes error types besides unfaithful error, and make corresponding analysis.

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

1. The dataset could be a good benchmark for faithful book-length summarization task.

Reasons to reject

1. some important details are missing from the paper about the dataset - how to you choose the books? do you select ones from diverse domain? - how do you evaluate and control the quality of the annotations? 2. In Table 3 in section3, how is the taxonomy created? what is the definition for each of the claim type and reasoning type? The difference between indirect reasoning, subjective reasoning and extra info reasoning is not very clear to me, at least from the examples presented. 3. The paper presents a very useful benchmark, with some interesting findings. It will be more insightful if the authors could point out some research directions based on the findings.

Reviewer xhrf7/10 · confidence 4/52024-05-16

Summary

- This work presents a detailed evaluation of LLM-generated summaries of long texts (full books). - The evaluation covers a human annotation for faithfulness of 3000+ individual claims in the summaries. - The paper compares summaries of different LLMs, and contributes to a qualitative understanding of weaknesses and common error types. - It provides mixed/negative results for automatic (LLM-based) faithfulness ratings, and connects this to abstractiveness and missing context, highlighting limitations to this paradigm in summarisation evaluation. - The authors promise to release the faithfulness annotations (though not the books themselves), which could be a valuable resource for the community.

Rating

7

Confidence

4

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

- The paper is well-written, clearly structured, concise, makes well motivated methodological choices grounded in recent prior work (summarisation-related, faithfulness-related, claim-extraction related, ...), and presents a research journey with lots of qualitative insights and interesting detail. - The annotation is cleverly designed with a focus on books that annotators are already familiar with. - The error analysis, in particular in connection with the auto-rating is extensive and in-depth. - I enjoyed reading this manuscript.

Reasons to reject

- There is little methodological innovation in this work - it fully focuses on evaluation. - While the paper paints a great picture of the status quo in terms of weaknesses, I miss a constructive path forward. The auto-rater path was explored, and its limits for this use case are made clear (which is great), but I miss concrete answers to the question "How can this be improved?" - Annotation quality is not cross-checked (from what I can tell) - e.g. via duplicate annotations and checking the agreement between annotators. I can see that this may not be straightforward since it requires multiple readers per book. But it would help shed some light on how reliable the faithfulness ratings are - without this annotation quality is unclear.

Questions to authors

- Did you validate that the annotators have read the book, or thoughts on how that could be validated? It's unclear to me how reliable self-reporting is in this context. - Could you address recall / coverage of the extracted claims? (e.g. in the example of Fig 2, the summary contains a part about a romantic relationship, which isn't extracted as a claim). - Unclear: claim vs subclaim-level annotation / multiple annotations per claim. Can you clarify this? - Are there any qualitative observations on summaries of the different models that correlate with faithfulness? - 0-shot prompting LLMs for faithfulness classification may not work well out of the box, depend on the prompt, etc. Do you have a sense for how important that is, and whether that changes the relative performance? Otherwise, what can we readers take away from these potentially very prompt-dependent relative numbers? - Did you obtain duplicate annotations for some books / summaries? What is the agreement? - Did you observe systematic differences across books? I.e. how much of the variation in faithfulness comes from different models, and how much from different books?

Reviewer FiuX8/10 · confidence 4/52024-05-16

Summary

This paper introduces a human evaluated dataset of LLM generated summaries of book-length documents (>100K tokens). Humans manually evaluated the faithfulness of summaries by checking the truthfulness of automatically extracted claims (using GPT4). Further, the evaluation covers typical issues of LLM generated summaries where the content of the summaries is analyzed, i.e. omission or chronological mistakes are evaluated. The paper introduces a taxonomy of such common mistakes. The dataset covers roughly 3K claim level annotations across 26 texts. The authors additionally implemented automatic rates by prompting an LLM in a zero-shot manner to verify a single claim given evidence from the book.

Rating

8

Confidence

4

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

This paper presents a useful study on current LLM capabilities regarding faithfulness. The presented results are useful information for the community and the provided dataset offers a usefull analysis, which will might improve future generations of LLMs. In general it is very valuable to be aware of current capabilities and common mistakes.

Reasons to reject

Intermediate steps for human evaluation are automatically performed, especially the claim extraction, which might also introduce errors. The paper would benefit from an analysis of the correctness and completeness of claims extracted from the summary (I could not find that in the paper). Apart from that, there are no obvious reasons to reject this paper.

Reviewer BatK2024-06-04

Thank you for the additional information. This will be important information to include in the next version of the paper.

Reviewer FiuX2024-06-05

Thank you for this qualitative information. Including this information in the next version of the paper is very valuable. Thanks for your great work and providing all those insights, I really enjoyed reading the paper.

Authorsrebuttal2024-06-06

Dear Reviewer AyeL, With the discussion period ending soon, could you please confirm if my rebuttal has addressed your concerns? Your feedback is valuable for our research's clarity and quality Thank you.

Reviewer AyeL2024-06-07

Thanks for the response. It addressed most of my concerns, thus I increased the score to 6: Marginally above acceptance threshold.

Reviewer wcHx2024-06-07

Thanks for this more detailed analysis! This is a valuable data point for the understanding of faithfulness evaluation, and probably worth including in the updated version of the paper.

Program Chairsdecision2024-07-10

Decision

Accept

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