RoMe: A Robust Metric for Evaluating Natural Language Generation
Research output: Contributions to collected editions/works › Article in conference proceedings › Research › peer-review
Authors
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 language | English |
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Title of host publication | ACL 2022 - 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers) |
Editors | Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio |
Number of pages | 13 |
Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) |
Publication date | 2022 |
Pages | 5645-5657 |
ISBN (electronic) | 9781955917216 |
Publication status | Published - 2022 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - ACL 2022 - Convention Centre Dublin & Online, Dublin, Ireland Duration: 22.05.2022 → 27.05.2022 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.
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