Data Citation for Large Language Models: A Challenge

Abstract

Large language models increasingly mediate access to information, and a growing body of work asks whether they cite the sources behind their outputs. That work treats citation as a verification device and applies it to textual documents. Scholarly citation serves two further functions, credit and provenance, and it applies to data as much as to text. This paper argues that data citation for large language models is an open challenge, distinct from document-level citation grounding and harder to solve. We ask how such models should cite data so that outputs stay verifiable, provenance stays traceable, and credit reaches data creators and curators. We set out three research directions. Training data attribution has to turn influence estimates into references for corpora absorbed into model parameters. Data citation at inference time has to identify datasets, subsets, and query results at the right granularity and fixity. Citing knowledge graph facts has to define what a reference to a single triple denotes and how credit propagates along provenance. Progress on all three depends on joint work across the database, information retrieval, knowledge representation, and artificial intelligence communities.