ChatGPT Inaccuracy Mitigation during Technical Report Understanding: Are We There Yet?

TL;DR

This paper investigates ChatGPT's inaccuracies in understanding technical reports, introduces CHIME to improve response correctness by preprocessing and validation, and demonstrates significant accuracy gains and user-perceived usefulness.

Contribution

The paper presents CHIME, a novel framework that preprocesses technical reports and guides ChatGPT to reduce hallucinations in technical contexts.

Findings

ChatGPT with RAG achieves 36.4% correctness on technical Q&A.

CHIME improves response correctness by 30.3%.

Users find CHIME-enhanced responses more useful.

Abstract

Hallucinations, the tendency to produce irrelevant/incorrect responses, are prevalent concerns in generative AI-based tools like ChatGPT. Although hallucinations in ChatGPT are studied for textual responses, it is unknown how ChatGPT hallucinates for technical texts that contain both textual and technical terms. We surveyed 47 software engineers and produced a benchmark of 412 Q&A pairs from the bug reports of two OSS projects. We find that a RAG-based ChatGPT (i.e., ChatGPT tuned with the benchmark issue reports) is 36.4% correct when producing answers to the questions, due to two reasons 1) limitations to understand complex technical contents in code snippets like stack traces, and 2) limitations to integrate contexts denoted in the technical terms and texts. We present CHIME (ChatGPT Inaccuracy Mitigation Engine) whose underlying principle is that if we can preprocess the technical reports better and guide the query validation process in ChatGPT, we can address the observed limitations. CHIME uses context-free grammar (CFG) to parse stack traces in technical reports. CHIME then verifies and fixes ChatGPT responses by applying metamorphic testing and query transformation. In our benchmark, CHIME shows 30.3% more correction over ChatGPT responses. In a user study, we find that the improved responses with CHIME are considered more useful than those generated from ChatGPT without CHIME.