Traditional reference-based metrics, such as BLEU and ROUGE, are less effective for assessing outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs) that produce highly creative or superior-quality text, or in situations where reference outputs are unavailable. While human evaluation remains an option, it is costly and difficult to scale. Recent work using LLMs as evaluators (LLM-as-a-judge) is promising, but trust and reliability remain a significant concern. Integrating human input is crucial to ensure criteria used to evaluate are aligned with the human’s intent, and evaluations are robust and consistent. This paper presents a user study of a design exploration called EvaluLLM, that enables users to leverage LLMs as customizable judges, promoting human involvement to balance trust and cost-saving potential with caution. Through interviews with eight domain experts, we identified the need for assistance in developing effective evaluation criteria aligning the LLM-as-a-judge with practitioners’ preferences and expectations. We offer findings and design recommendations to optimize human-assisted LLM-as-judge systems.

Label noise—incorrectly or ambiguously labeled training examples—can negatively impact model performance. Although noise detection techniques have been around for decades, practitioners rarely apply them, as manual noise remediation is a tedious process. Examples incorrectly flagged as noise waste reviewers’ time, and correcting label noise without guidance can be difficult. We propose LNIC, a noise-detection method that uses an example’s neighborhood within the training set to (a) reduce false positives and (b) provide an explanation as to why the ex- ample was flagged as noise. We demonstrate on several short-text classification datasets that LNIC outperforms the state of the art on measures of precision and F0.5-score. We also show how LNIC’s training set context helps a reviewer to understand and correct label noise in a dataset. The LNIC tool lowers the barriers to label noise remediation, increasing its utility for NLP practitioners.