DocTER: Evaluating Document-Based Knowledge Editing

Large language models (LLMs) possess a wealth of knowledge encoded in their parameters. However, this knowledge may become outdated or unsuitable over time. As a result, there has been a growing interest in knowledge editing for LLMs and evaluating its effectiveness. Existing studies primarily focus on knowledge editing using factual triplets, which not only incur high costs for collection but also struggle to express complex facts. Furthermore, these studies are often limited in their evaluation perspectives. In this paper, we propose Eva-KELLM, a new benchmark for evaluating knowledge editing of LLMs. This benchmark includes an evaluation framework and a corresponding dataset. Under our framework, we first ask the LLM to perform knowledge editing using raw documents, which provides a more convenient and universal approach compared to using factual triplets. We then evaluate the updated LLM from multiple perspectives. In addition to assessing the effectiveness of knowledge editing and the retention of unrelated knowledge from conventional studies, we further test the LLM's ability in two aspects: 1) Reasoning with the altered knowledge, aiming for the LLM to genuinely learn the altered knowledge instead of simply memorizing it. 2) Cross-lingual knowledge transfer, where the LLM updated with raw documents in one language should be capable of handling queries from another language. To facilitate further research, we construct and release the corresponding dataset. Using this benchmark, we investigate the effectiveness of several commonly-used knowledge editing methods. Experimental results indicate that the current methods for knowledge editing using raw documents are not effective in yielding satisfactory results, particularly when it comes to reasoning with altered knowledge and cross-lingual knowledge transfer.