HumanRankEval: Automatic Evaluation of LMs as Conversational Assistants

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gritta, Milan, Lampouras, Gerasimos, Iacobacci, Ignacio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Gritta, Milan
Lampouras, Gerasimos
Iacobacci, Ignacio
author_facet Gritta, Milan
Lampouras, Gerasimos
Iacobacci, Ignacio
contents Language models (LMs) as conversational assistants recently became popular tools that help people accomplish a variety of tasks. These typically result from adapting LMs pretrained on general domain text sequences through further instruction-tuning and possibly preference optimisation methods. The evaluation of such LMs would ideally be performed using human judgement, however, this is not scalable. On the other hand, automatic evaluation featuring auxiliary LMs as judges and/or knowledge-based tasks is scalable but struggles with assessing conversational ability and adherence to instructions. To help accelerate the development of LMs as conversational assistants, we propose a novel automatic evaluation task: HumanRankEval (HRE). It consists of a large-scale, diverse and high-quality set of questions, each with several answers authored and scored by humans. To perform evaluation, HRE ranks these answers based on their log-likelihood under the LM's distribution, and subsequently calculates their correlation with the corresponding human rankings. We support HRE's efficacy by investigating how efficiently it separates pretrained and instruction-tuned LMs of various sizes. We show that HRE correlates well with human judgements and is particularly responsive to model changes following instruction-tuning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_09186
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HumanRankEval: Automatic Evaluation of LMs as Conversational Assistants
Gritta, Milan
Lampouras, Gerasimos
Iacobacci, Ignacio
Computation and Language
Language models (LMs) as conversational assistants recently became popular tools that help people accomplish a variety of tasks. These typically result from adapting LMs pretrained on general domain text sequences through further instruction-tuning and possibly preference optimisation methods. The evaluation of such LMs would ideally be performed using human judgement, however, this is not scalable. On the other hand, automatic evaluation featuring auxiliary LMs as judges and/or knowledge-based tasks is scalable but struggles with assessing conversational ability and adherence to instructions. To help accelerate the development of LMs as conversational assistants, we propose a novel automatic evaluation task: HumanRankEval (HRE). It consists of a large-scale, diverse and high-quality set of questions, each with several answers authored and scored by humans. To perform evaluation, HRE ranks these answers based on their log-likelihood under the LM's distribution, and subsequently calculates their correlation with the corresponding human rankings. We support HRE's efficacy by investigating how efficiently it separates pretrained and instruction-tuned LMs of various sizes. We show that HRE correlates well with human judgements and is particularly responsive to model changes following instruction-tuning.
title HumanRankEval: Automatic Evaluation of LMs as Conversational Assistants
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.09186