WebGLM: Towards an Efficient and Reliable Web-Enhanced Question-Answering System
Hanyu Lai, Xiao Liu, Hao Yu, Yifan Xu, Iat Long Iong, Shuntian Yao, Aohan Zeng, Zhengxiao Du, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang · ACM Transactions on Information Systems · 2025
We present WebGLM, an enhanced Large Language Model (LLM)-based retrieval question-answering system based on the ChatGLM3-6B, offering significant improvements over previous systems. We aim to augment a pre-trained LLM with web search and reliable retrieval capabilities while being efficient for real-world deployments. Leveraging LLM’s in-context learning ability and a robust filter strategy, we create a high-quality training dataset and address the hallucination issue with a self-check mechanism. Our base model, ChatGLM3-6B, excels in extracting critical information and generating desired responses. We tackle the decline in retrieval effectiveness for complex queries with a keywording technique and incorporate more web content for references. We align with user preferences by training a human preference-aware scorer and employing DPO training for direct alignment. Extensive experiments, including human evaluations and the Turing test, demonstrate WebGLM’s superior performance against leading web-enhanced question-answering systems, significantly enhancing performance and efficiency. The code, demo, and data are at https://github.com/THUDM/WebGLM .