@inproceedings{bae-etal-2026-referee,
    title = "{R}e{FE}ree: Reference-Free and Fine-Grained Method for Evaluating Factual Consistency in Real-World Code Summarization",
    author = "Bae, Suyoung  and
      Na, CheolWon  and
      Lee, Jaehoon  and
      Lee, Yumin  and
      Choi, YunSeok  and
      Lee, Jee-Hyong",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.653/",
    pages = "14352--14377",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "As Large Language Models (LLMs) have become capable of generating long and descriptive code summaries, accurate and reliable evaluation of factual consistency has become a critical challenge. However, previous evaluation methods are primarily designed for short summaries of isolated code snippets. Consequently, they struggle to provide fine-grained evaluation of multi-sentence functionalities and fail to accurately assess dependency context commonly found in real-world code summaries.To address this, we propose ReFEree, a reference-free and fine-grained method for evaluating factual consistency in real-world code summaries. We define factual inconsistency criteria specific to code summaries and evaluate them at the segment level using these criteria along with dependency information. These segment-level results are then aggregated into a fine-grained score. We construct a code summarization benchmark with human-annotated factual consistency labels. The evaluation results demonstrate that ReFEree achieves the highest correlation with human judgment among 13 baselines, improving 15-18{\%} over the previous state-of-the-art. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/bsy99615/ReFEree.git."
}