An Extensive Evaluation of Factual Consistency in Large Language Models for Data-to-Text Generation

Abstract: LLMs have shown exceptional performance across various Data-to-Text Generation (DTG) tasks. However, generating factually consistent text in DTG remains challenging for LLMs. Despite this, in-depth evaluations of LLM factual consistency for DTG remain missing in the current literature. This paper addresses this gap by providing an extensive evaluation of factual consistency in LLMs for DTG. Our evaluation covers five widely used DTG datasets (E2E, ViGGo, WikiTableText, DART, and WebNLG) and five prominent LLM families (T5, BART, OPT, BLOOM, and Llama 2). To ensure a thorough evaluation of factual consistency, we use four state-of-the-art automatic metrics and include essential human assessments. Our extensive evaluations reveals three key findings regarding factual consistency in LLMs for DTG. First, Llama 2 often excels in generating factually consistent text, although smaller models like T5 and BART can achieve strong factual consistency on larger, lexically less-diverse datasets. Second, the average rate of change (AROC) indicates that increasing model size (number of model trainable parameters) generally enhances factual consistency of LLMs in DTG. Third, we observe that source-reference divergence (i.e., when the reference text diverges semantically from the source) typically reduces the factual consistency of LLMs in DTG.