journal article·2025-09-28Open access

Mind the Link: Discourse Link-Aware Hallucination Detection in Summarization

Dawon Lee, Hyuckchul Jung, Yong Suk Choi

Applied Sciences· Volume 15· Issue 19

Abstract

Recent studies on detecting hallucinations in summaries follow a method of decomposing summaries into atomic content units (ACUs) and then determining whether each unit logically matches the document text based on natural language inference. However, this fails to consider discourse link relations such as temporal order, causality, and purpose, leading to the inability to detect conflicts in semantic connections between individual summary ACUs, even when the conflicts are present in the document. To overcome this limitation, this study proposes a method of extracting Discourse Link-Aware Content Unit (DL-ACU) by converting the summary into an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph and structuring the discourse link relations between ACUs. Additionally, to align summary ACUs with corresponding document information in a fine-grained manner, we propose a Selective Document-Atomic Content Unit (SD-ACU). For each summary ACU, the SD-ACU retrieves only the most relevant document sentences and then decomposes them into document ACUs. Applying the DL-ACU module to existing hallucination detection systems such as FIZZ and FENICE reduces the error rate of discourse link errors on FRANK. When both modules are combined, the system improves balanced accuracy and ROC-AUC across major benchmarks. This suggests the proposed method effectively captures discourse link errors while enabling ACU-to-ACU alignment.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Advanced Text Analysis Techniques · Complex Network Analysis Techniques · Topic Modeling

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Department of Intelligence and Convergence, Hanyang University, Seoul 04763, Republic of Korea

Meta, Ads Privacy ML Infra, New York, NY 10003, USA

Department of Computer Science, Hanyang University, Seoul 04763, Republic of Korea

Funding

Institute of Information and communications Technology Planning and evaluation · National Research Foundation of Korea

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