Adapting Standard Retrieval Benchmarks to Evaluate Generated Answers

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Arabzadeh, Negar, Bigdeli, Amin, Clarke, Charles L. A.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Arabzadeh, Negar
Bigdeli, Amin
Clarke, Charles L. A.
author_facet Arabzadeh, Negar
Bigdeli, Amin
Clarke, Charles L. A.
contents Large language models can now directly generate answers to many factual questions without referencing external sources. Unfortunately, relatively little attention has been paid to methods for evaluating the quality and correctness of these answers, for comparing the performance of one model to another, or for comparing one prompt to another. In addition, the quality of generated answers are rarely directly compared to the quality of retrieved answers. As models evolve and prompts are modified, we have no systematic way to measure improvements without resorting to expensive human judgments. To address this problem we adapt standard retrieval benchmarks to evaluate answers generated by large language models. Inspired by the BERTScore metric for summarization, we explore two approaches. In the first, we base our evaluation on the benchmark relevance judgments. We empirically run experiments on how information retrieval relevance judgments can be utilized as an anchor to evaluating the generated answers. In the second, we compare generated answers to the top results retrieved by a diverse set of retrieval models, ranging from traditional approaches to advanced methods, allowing us to measure improvements without human judgments. In both cases, we measure the similarity between an embedded representation of the generated answer and an embedded representation of a known, or assumed, relevant passage from the retrieval benchmark.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_04842
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adapting Standard Retrieval Benchmarks to Evaluate Generated Answers
Arabzadeh, Negar
Bigdeli, Amin
Clarke, Charles L. A.
Information Retrieval
Large language models can now directly generate answers to many factual questions without referencing external sources. Unfortunately, relatively little attention has been paid to methods for evaluating the quality and correctness of these answers, for comparing the performance of one model to another, or for comparing one prompt to another. In addition, the quality of generated answers are rarely directly compared to the quality of retrieved answers. As models evolve and prompts are modified, we have no systematic way to measure improvements without resorting to expensive human judgments. To address this problem we adapt standard retrieval benchmarks to evaluate answers generated by large language models. Inspired by the BERTScore metric for summarization, we explore two approaches. In the first, we base our evaluation on the benchmark relevance judgments. We empirically run experiments on how information retrieval relevance judgments can be utilized as an anchor to evaluating the generated answers. In the second, we compare generated answers to the top results retrieved by a diverse set of retrieval models, ranging from traditional approaches to advanced methods, allowing us to measure improvements without human judgments. In both cases, we measure the similarity between an embedded representation of the generated answer and an embedded representation of a known, or assumed, relevant passage from the retrieval benchmark.
title Adapting Standard Retrieval Benchmarks to Evaluate Generated Answers
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04842