Generative AI models exhibit remarkable potential; however, hallucinations across various tasks present a significant challenge, particularly for longer inputs that current approaches struggle to address effectively. We introduce SCALE (Source Chunking Approach for Large-scale inconsistency Evaluation), a task-agnostic model for detecting factual inconsistencies using a novel chunking strategy. Specifically, SCALE is a Natural Language Inference (NLI) based model that uses large text chunks to condition over long texts. This approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in factual inconsistency detection for diverse tasks and long inputs. Additionally, we leverage the chunking mechanism and employ a novel algorithm to explain SCALE’s decisions through relevant source sentence retrieval. Our evaluations reveal that SCALE outperforms existing methods on both standard benchmarks and a new long-form dialogue dataset ScreenEval we constructed. Moreover, SCALE surpasses competitive systems in efficiency and model explanation evaluations. We have released our code and data publicly to GitHub.

Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition through comparative learning. Motivated by cognitive findings, we generated a small dataset that enables the computation models to compare the similarities and differences of various attributes, learn to filter out and extract the common information for each shared linguistic label. We frame the acquisition of words as not only the information filtration process, but also as representation-symbol mapping. This procedure does not involve a fixed vocabulary size, nor a discriminative objective, and allows the models to continually learn more concepts efficiently. Our results in controlled experiments have shown the potential of this approach for efficient continual learning of grounded words.