RoMe: A Robust Metric for Evaluating Natural Language Generation

Research output: Contributions to collected editions/worksArticle in conference proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Authors

  • Md Rashad Al Hasan Rony
  • Liubov Kovriguina
  • Debanjan Chaudhuri
  • Ricardo Usbeck
  • Jens Lehmann

Evaluating Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems is a challenging task. Firstly, the metric should ensure that the generated hypothesis reflects the reference's semantics. Secondly, it should consider the grammatical quality of the generated sentence. Thirdly, it should be robust enough to handle various surface forms of the generated sentence. Thus, an effective evaluation metric has to be multifaceted. In this paper, we propose an automatic evaluation metric incorporating several core aspects of natural language understanding (language competence, syntactic and semantic variation). Our proposed metric, RoMe, is trained on language features such as semantic similarity combined with tree edit distance and grammatical acceptability, using a self-supervised neural network to assess the overall quality of the generated sentence. Moreover, we perform an extensive robustness analysis of the state-of-the-art methods and RoMe. Empirical results suggest that RoMe has a stronger correlation to human judgment over state-of-the-art metrics in evaluating system-generated sentences across several NLG tasks.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationACL 2022 - 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
EditorsSmaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Number of pages13
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Publication date2022
Pages5645-5657
ISBN (electronic)9781955917216
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes
Event60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - ACL 2022 - Convention Centre Dublin & Online, Dublin, Ireland
Duration: 22.05.202227.05.2022
Conference number: 60
https://www.2022.aclweb.org/

Bibliographical note

We acknowledge the support of the following projects: SPEAKER (BMWi FKZ 01MK20011A), JOSEPH (Fraunhofer Zukunftsstiftung), OpenGPT-X (BMWK FKZ 68GX21007A), the excellence clusters ML2R (BmBF FKZ 01 15 18038 A/B/C),
ScaDS.AI (IS18026A-F) and TAILOR (EU GA 952215).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Recently viewed

Publications

  1. Interaction effects of effort-reward imbalance and overcommitment on emotional exhaustion and job performance
  2. Nature’s contributions to people in mountains: A review
  3. § 348
  4. Controlling nachhaltiger Wertschöpfungsketten
  5. The role of organized publics in articulating the exnovation of fossil-fuel technologies for intra- and intergenerational energy justice in energy transitions
  6. Influences of entrainers to engine oil to improve the drag-out of biodiesel
  7. Ex Machina
  8. Environmental heterogeneity drives fine-scale species assembly and functional diversity of annual plants in a semi-arid environment
  9. Exporter performance in the German business services sector
  10. Healthy Eating and Physical Activity in Schools in Europe
  11. Loan managers’ trust and credit access for SMEs
  12. Polite rejections
  13. Near Field Communication im Destinationsmanagement
  14. Macroeconomic shocks and banks’ foreign assets
  15. Einführung
  16. Gesundheitswissenschaft
  17. Stakeholders' perspectives on the operationalisation of the ecosystem service concept
  18. From Ideation to Realization
  19. Zwischen Methodenpluralismus und Datenhandel
  20. The roots of female emancipation
  21. § 23 Wasserkraft
  22. Microstructure and mechanical properties of high pressure die cast AM50 magnesium alloy containing Ce
  23. Lipids in preventive dentistry
  24. Who participates in which type of teacher professional development?
  25. Qu’est-ce que la « marge d’indétermination »?
  26. Prayer in C
  27. Business Entry and Window of Opportunity
  28. Varianten des Nudgings?
  29. Entwicklung einer Fallstudie für die Lehre im IT-gestützten Personalmanagement