Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation
Ziwei JiNayeon LeeRita FrieskeTiezheng YuDan SuYan XuEtsuko IshiiYe Jin BangAndrea MadottoPascale Fung
Systematizes the evaluation metrics and mitigation techniques for hallucinations across diverse natural language generation tasks and large language models to guide the development of factually reliable systems.
The article addresses the growing problem of hallucination in natural language generation systems, where models produce fluent but unfaithful or nonsensical text. This issue degrades performance in applications such as summarization, dialogue, and machine translation while raising safety risks in domains like medicine and privacy. The problem has become more pressing with advances in transformer-based models that improve fluency yet remain prone to generating unsupported content.
The survey sets out to evaluate the full scope of hallucination research across NLG, offering definitions, causes, metrics, and mitigation strategies while covering both general principles and task-specific progress. It reviews literature on abstractive summarization, dialogue generation, question answering, data-to-text, translation, vision-language tasks, and large language models.
The authors conduct a systematic literature review organized into general sections on definitions, data and training contributors, evaluation metrics, and mitigation methods, followed by detailed task analyses. They draw on dozens of studies, highlight common patterns, and update sections on large language models to reflect recent developments.
Three core findings stand out: hallucinations divide into intrinsic types that contradict the source and extrinsic types unverifiable from it; they arise from source-reference mismatches in data as well as from model architecture, decoding strategies, and exposure bias during training; and existing metrics such as ROUGE or BLEU correlate poorly with human judgments of faithfulness, prompting new statistical, model-based, and human evaluation approaches. Mitigation succeeds most when combining data cleaning, architectural changes, reinforcement learning, and post-processing.
These results indicate that unchecked hallucinations increase operational risk, limit deployment in high-stakes settings, and require coordinated progress across metrics and methods. They also show that extrinsic hallucinations remain especially difficult to detect and correct because they may draw on external facts.
Next steps include development of fine-grained metrics that separate hallucination types, automated fact-checking pipelines for extrinsic cases, and methods that explicitly model numerals and long-context reasoning. Task-specific work should prioritize dialogue summarization and logical data-to-text generation, while controllability techniques can help balance faithfulness against diversity.
The survey relies on published studies through mid-2024 and notes that definitions and evaluation standards still vary across tasks. Its conclusions are therefore most reliable for well-studied tasks and should be treated cautiously for rapidly evolving large language model applications where new evidence continues to emerge.
- Paper: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks, Patrick Lewis et al. (2020). This seminal paper introduces retrieval-augmented generation to ground neural language models in external knowledge, providing foundational grounding mechanisms surveyed in the source.
- Paper: Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks, Abigail See et al. (2017). This paper develops pointer-generator networks and coverage mechanisms to curb factual fabrications and repetition in neural abstractive summarization, establishing core mitigation techniques referenced in the survey.
- Paper: The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration, Ari Holtzman et al. (2020). This work analyzes how decoding strategies induce degeneration and repetition in language generation, which is essential for understanding the decoding-related causes of hallucination discussed in the survey.
- Paper: A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization, Alexander M. Rush et al. (2015). This foundational work establishes neural attention architectures for abstractive summarization, providing key architectural background for the generation models analyzed in the survey.
- Paper: Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with CheckList, Marco Túlio Ribeiro et al. (2020). This work introduces behavioral and linguistic capability testing beyond standard overlap metrics, informing the survey's discussion of evaluation gaps in natural language generation.
- Paper: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions, Lei Huang et al. (2023). This survey expands upon the foundational NLG hallucination taxonomy by providing an end-to-end framework specifically tailored to modern large language models and retrieval-augmented systems.
- Paper: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey, Yunfan Gao et al. (2023). This comprehensive survey provides an in-depth continuation of retrieval-augmented generation paradigms as a primary architecture to mitigate factual hallucinations in language models.
- Paper: G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment, Yang Liu et al. (2023). This paper advances model-based evaluation methods by using large language models with chain-of-thought prompting to evaluate generation quality, addressing the metric failures highlighted in the survey.
- Paper: Ragas: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation, Shahul Es et al. (2024). This work implements automated, reference-free metrics specifically designed to evaluate faithfulness and context relevance in retrieval-augmented generation pipelines.
- Paper: Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection, Akari Asai et al. (2024). This work introduces a concrete mitigation framework that trains language models to retrieve on demand and critique the factuality of their own generations.
- Paper: Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate, Yilun Du et al. (2023). This paper presents a multi-agent debate mechanism that actively reduces factual errors and hallucinations during generation through iterative peer critique.
- Paper: Active Retrieval Augmented Generation, Zhengbao Jiang et al. (2023). This work develops an active retrieval method that monitors token-level generation uncertainty to dynamically fetch supporting facts and mitigate long-form hallucination.
- Paper: A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models, Yupeng Chang et al. (2023). This survey broadens the scope of generation assessment into a holistic evaluation taxonomy spanning capability, safety, and reliability across large language models.
- Paper: From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge, Dawei Li et al. (2025). This survey details the emerging LLM-as-a-judge paradigm to overcome traditional overlap metric limitations when assessing faithfulness and generation quality.
- Paper: Can LLMs Predict Their Own Failures? Self-Awareness via Internal Circuits, Amirhosein Ghasemabadi et al. (2025). This research explores an internal circuit mechanism for language models to predict their own factual and reasoning failures during generation.
