APPLS: Evaluating Evaluation Metrics for Plain Language Summarization

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Guo, Yue, August, Tal, Leroy, Gondy, Cohen, Trevor, Wang, Lucy Lu
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Guo, Yue
August, Tal
Leroy, Gondy
Cohen, Trevor
Wang, Lucy Lu
author_facet Guo, Yue
August, Tal
Leroy, Gondy
Cohen, Trevor
Wang, Lucy Lu
contents While there has been significant development of models for Plain Language Summarization (PLS), evaluation remains a challenge. PLS lacks a dedicated assessment metric, and the suitability of text generation evaluation metrics is unclear due to the unique transformations involved (e.g., adding background explanations, removing jargon). To address these questions, our study introduces a granular meta-evaluation testbed, APPLS, designed to evaluate metrics for PLS. We identify four PLS criteria from previous work -- informativeness, simplification, coherence, and faithfulness -- and define a set of perturbations corresponding to these criteria that sensitive metrics should be able to detect. We apply these perturbations to extractive hypotheses for two PLS datasets to form our testbed. Using APPLS, we assess performance of 14 metrics, including automated scores, lexical features, and LLM prompt-based evaluations. Our analysis reveals that while some current metrics show sensitivity to specific criteria, no single method captures all four criteria simultaneously. We therefore recommend a suite of automated metrics be used to capture PLS quality along all relevant criteria. This work contributes the first meta-evaluation testbed for PLS and a comprehensive evaluation of existing metrics. APPLS and our evaluation code is available at https://github.com/LinguisticAnomalies/APPLS.
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spellingShingle APPLS: Evaluating Evaluation Metrics for Plain Language Summarization
Guo, Yue
August, Tal
Leroy, Gondy
Cohen, Trevor
Wang, Lucy Lu
Computation and Language
While there has been significant development of models for Plain Language Summarization (PLS), evaluation remains a challenge. PLS lacks a dedicated assessment metric, and the suitability of text generation evaluation metrics is unclear due to the unique transformations involved (e.g., adding background explanations, removing jargon). To address these questions, our study introduces a granular meta-evaluation testbed, APPLS, designed to evaluate metrics for PLS. We identify four PLS criteria from previous work -- informativeness, simplification, coherence, and faithfulness -- and define a set of perturbations corresponding to these criteria that sensitive metrics should be able to detect. We apply these perturbations to extractive hypotheses for two PLS datasets to form our testbed. Using APPLS, we assess performance of 14 metrics, including automated scores, lexical features, and LLM prompt-based evaluations. Our analysis reveals that while some current metrics show sensitivity to specific criteria, no single method captures all four criteria simultaneously. We therefore recommend a suite of automated metrics be used to capture PLS quality along all relevant criteria. This work contributes the first meta-evaluation testbed for PLS and a comprehensive evaluation of existing metrics. APPLS and our evaluation code is available at https://github.com/LinguisticAnomalies/APPLS.
title APPLS: Evaluating Evaluation Metrics for Plain Language Summarization
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14341