Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07659 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866914149915688960 |
|---|---|
| author | Balamurali, Sai Shridhar Cheng, Lu |
| author_facet | Balamurali, Sai Shridhar Cheng, Lu |
| contents | Evaluating answers from state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) is challenging: lexical metrics miss semantic nuances, whereas "LLM-as-Judge" scoring is computationally expensive. We re-evaluate a lightweight alternative -- off-the-shelf Natural Language Inference (NLI) scoring augmented by a simple lexical-match flag and find that this decades-old technique matches GPT-4o's accuracy (89.9%) on long-form QA, while requiring orders-of-magnitude fewer parameters. To test human alignment of these metrics rigorously, we introduce DIVER-QA, a new 3000-sample human-annotated benchmark spanning five QA datasets and five candidate LLMs. Our results highlight that inexpensive NLI-based evaluation remains competitive and offer DIVER-QA as an open resource for future metric research. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07659 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Revisiting NLI: Towards Cost-Effective and Human-Aligned Metrics for Evaluating LLMs in Question Answering Balamurali, Sai Shridhar Cheng, Lu Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Evaluating answers from state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) is challenging: lexical metrics miss semantic nuances, whereas "LLM-as-Judge" scoring is computationally expensive. We re-evaluate a lightweight alternative -- off-the-shelf Natural Language Inference (NLI) scoring augmented by a simple lexical-match flag and find that this decades-old technique matches GPT-4o's accuracy (89.9%) on long-form QA, while requiring orders-of-magnitude fewer parameters. To test human alignment of these metrics rigorously, we introduce DIVER-QA, a new 3000-sample human-annotated benchmark spanning five QA datasets and five candidate LLMs. Our results highlight that inexpensive NLI-based evaluation remains competitive and offer DIVER-QA as an open resource for future metric research. |
| title | Revisiting NLI: Towards Cost-Effective and Human-Aligned Metrics for Evaluating LLMs in Question Answering |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07659 |