David Hurych
2026
LLM as a Meta-Judge: Synthetic Data for NLP Evaluation Metric Validation
Lukáš Eigler | Jindřich Libovický | David Hurych
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Lukáš Eigler | Jindřich Libovický | David Hurych
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Validating evaluation metrics for NLG typically relies on expensive and time-consuming human annotations, which predominantly exists only for English datasets. We propose LLM as a Meta-Judge, a scalable framework that utilizes LLMs to generate synthetic evaluation datasets via controlled semantic degradation of real data, replacing human judgment. We validate our approach using meta-correlation, measuring the alignment between metric rankings derived from synthetic data and those from standard human benchmarks. Experiments across Machine Translation, Question Answering, and Summarization demonstrate that synthetic validation serves as a reliable proxy for human judgment, achieving meta-correlations exceeding 0.9 in multilingual QA and proves to be a viable alternative where human judgments are unavailable or too expensive to obtain. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/eiglerl/meta-judge.