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Stream/Area:
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Subject:
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Paper ID:
IJSREM67604
Volume:
10 |
9 |
Sep 2026
Pages:
1-9
Publication Frequency:
Monthly (12 issues per year)
License:International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing free use and distribution with proper attribution.

Department of Computer Science
Patkar Varde College

Department of Computer Science
Patkar Varde College
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a standard way to attach an external store to a large language model (LLM). The usual story is that retrieval grounds the answer, and grounding removes hallucination. The story is incomplete. An LLM inside a RAG pipeline can still misread the retrieved passage, mix the passage with unsupported memory from pretraining, or invent a clause when the retriever returns weak text. The leftover risk is worse than ungrounded generation in one respect: a citation sits next to the sentence, so a reader who cannot open the source treats the line as audited. This paper writes up the hallucination detection and multi-source verification framework from our M.Sc. project. Multi-format documents (PDF, DOCX, TXT, images, scanned pages) are ingested, run through OCR when needed, chunked, embedded with Sentence Transformers, and indexed in FAISS, with metadata in MongoDB. A locally hosted generator (Ollama with Qwen3 8B) writes an answer from retrieved chunks. That answer, and independently an uploaded document, is split into atomic factual claims. Each claim is scored with semantic similarity and classified with a natural-language-inference (NLI) model. When the internal store cannot support a decision, a reliability-tiered web fallback is used. Claims receive one of five labels — Supported, Partially Supported, Contradicted / Likely Hallucination, Unverifiable, or Out of Knowledge Base — with evidence, a confidence figure, and a short justification. The intended interface is a React client and a Flask service for a single authenticated role, including an analytics view. Evaluation is specified as an ablation across baseline RAG, similarity-only checking, NLI-only checking, combined signals, and combined signals plus web fallback, using precision, recall, F1, error rates, retrieval metrics, and confidence calibration.
KEYWORDS
This paper presented a claim-level framework for detecting and verifying hallucinations in RAG systems. The main idea is to check individual factual claims rather than treating the entire generated response as one unit. The framework combines semantic similarity and Natural Language Inference (NLI) to improve verification and uses different outcome categories to distinguish between supported claims, contradictions, partial support, and cases where sufficient evidence is not available. When the internal knowledge base cannot provide enough information, the system can also use external web sources based on their reliability. The proposed system is designed using locally hosted and open-source technologies, making it suitable for reproducible research without relying on paid APIs. An ablation-based evaluation plan has also been defined to compare the individual verification components with the complete framework. Confidence calibration is included to check whether the confidence values produced by the system match its actual results. At the current stage, the system is still under implementation and the planned experiments have not yet been completed. Therefore, this work does not claim measured improvements in accuracy or hallucination detection. The next step is to complete the implementation, conduct the planned evaluation, and analyze both the strengths and limitations of the proposed approach based on experimental results.
[1] P. Lewis, E. Perez, A. Piktus, F. Petroni, V. Karpukhin, N. Goyal, H. Küttler, M. Lewis, W. Yih, T. Rocktäschel, S. Riedel, and D. Kiela, “Retrieval-augmented generation for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks,” in Proc. NeurIPS, 2020. [2] C. Niu et al., “RAGTruth: A hallucination corpus for developing trustworthy retrieval-augmented language models,” in Proc. ACL, 2024. [3] J. Li, X. Cheng, W. X. Zhao, J. Nie, and J. Wen, “HaluEval: A large-scale hallucination evaluation benchmark for large language models,” in Proc. EMNLP, 2023. [4] MultiHal and related 2025 studies on semantic similarity, NLI, and embedding limits for RAG hallucination detection. [5] “Rethinking evaluation for LLM hallucination detection,” preprint, 2026. [6] Cleanlab, “Notes on annotation quality in public hallucination benchmarks,” 2024. [7] A. Williams, N. Nangia, and S. Bowman, “A broad-coverage challenge corpus for sentence understanding through inference,” in Proc. NAACL-HLT, 2018. [8] N. Reimers and I. Gurevych, “Sentence-BERT: Sentence embeddings using Siamese BERT-networks,” in Proc. EMNLP-IJCNLP, 2019. [9] Á. Kovács and G. Recski, “LettuceDetect: A hallucination detection framework for RAG applications,” 2025. [10] Ragas project documentation.
Publication Date
9/30/2026
Peer Review Type
Double-Blind Peer Review
Review Rounds: 2
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Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest related to this research work.
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