Greta Warren, Christine M. Lehane, Jessica Heal, Sila Eser, Denise M. Leto, Isabelle Augenstein
Generative AI systems increasingly mediate how people seek information, yet communicating AI factuality to laypeople remains challenging. Through a mixed-methods investigation involving interviews (N=8), a survey (N=1,000), and an experiment (N=5,151), we examine how people evaluate AI-generated information for gardening, mathematical, and medical queries, and how factuality indicators (confidence and sources) shape perceptions. Our interviews and survey show people selectively verify AI responses using external and AI-provided evidence, moderated by contextual factors. Although confidence-indicators affected trust and accuracy perceptions, people hold diverse, ambiguous interpretations of AI confidence. Sources were viewed as crucial, yet users raised concerns about source reliability and verification effort. Our experiment showed that confidence and source-based indicators influenced initial perceptions, but effects disappeared once participants learned the response's correctness. Medical queries elicited skepticism regardless of indicator. Findings motivate helping users interpret model confidence and integrating source information into the interface to support calibrated trust in AI-supported information-seeking.
Jingyi Sun University of Copenhagen, Greta Warren University of Copenhagen, Irina Shklovski University of Copenhagen, Isabelle Augenstein University of Copenhagen
Human–AI collaboration in knowledge-intensive tasks such as fact-checking requires understanding model uncertainty in multi-document reasoning amid conflicting/agreeing evidence. Yet, existing methods only express uncertainty as numbers or hedges without revealing which evidence conflicts cause the uncertainty, leaving users unable to resolve disagreements. We present CLUE (Conflict- Agreement-aware Language-model Uncertainty Explanations), a plug-and-play white-box framework that, to our knowledge, is the first to generate natural-language explanations of model uncertainty grounded in conflicting/agreeing evidence. CLUE (i) identifies span-level claim–evidence and inter-evidence relations that signal conflict or agreement without supervision, and (ii) uses these relations to steer explanation generation, articulating how they drive the model’s uncertainty. Across three language models and two fact-checking datasets, CLUE produces explanations that more faithfully track model uncertainty and better align with the model’s fact-checking decisions than span-agnostic explanation prompting; human raters also judge them more helpful, more informative, less redundant, and more logically consistent with the input. By explicitly tying uncertainty to evidence conflicts and agreements, CLUE supports practical fact-checking and other tasks that require reasoning over complex, conflicting information.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表