Document Attribution: Examining Citation Relationships using Large
  Language Models
Authors: name: Vipula Rawte; name: Ryan A. Rossi; name: Franck Dernoncourt; name: Nedim Lipka
Published: 2025-05-09 04:40:11

Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to document-based
tasks - such as document summarization, question answering, and information
extraction - where user requirements focus on retrieving information from
provided documents rather than relying on the model's parametric knowledge,
ensuring the trustworthiness and interpretability of these systems has become a
critical concern. A central approach to addressing this challenge is
attribution, which involves tracing the generated outputs back to their source
documents. However, since LLMs can produce inaccurate or imprecise responses,
it is crucial to assess the reliability of these citations.
  To tackle this, our work proposes two techniques. (1) A zero-shot approach
that frames attribution as a straightforward textual entailment task. Our
method using flan-ul2 demonstrates an improvement of 0.27% and 2.4% over the
best baseline of ID and OOD sets of AttributionBench, respectively. (2) We also
explore the role of the attention mechanism in enhancing the attribution
process. Using a smaller LLM, flan-t5-small, the F1 scores outperform the
baseline across almost all layers except layer 4 and layers 8 through 11.