AHP-Powered LLM Reasoning for Multi-Criteria Evaluation of Open-Ended Responses

Xiaotian Lu, Jiyi Li, Koh Takeuchi, Hisashi Kashima


Abstract
Question answering (QA) tasks have been extensively studied in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Answers to open-ended questions are highly diverse and difficult to quantify, and cannot be simply evaluated as correct or incorrect, unlike close-ended questions with definitive answers. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across various tasks, they exhibit relatively weaker performance in evaluating answers to open-ended questions. In this study, we propose a method that leverages LLMs and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to assess answers to open-ended questions. We utilized LLMs to generate multiple evaluation criteria for a question. Subsequently, answers were subjected to pairwise comparisons under each criterion with LLMs, and scores for each answer were calculated in the AHP. We conducted experiments on four datasets using both ChatGPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4. Our results indicate that our approach more closely aligns with human judgment compared to the four baselines. Additionally, we explored the impact of the number of criteria, variations in models, and differences in datasets on the results.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.101
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1847–1856
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2024.findings-emnlp.101/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.101
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaotian Lu, Jiyi Li, Koh Takeuchi, and Hisashi Kashima. 2024. AHP-Powered LLM Reasoning for Multi-Criteria Evaluation of Open-Ended Responses. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 1847–1856, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AHP-Powered LLM Reasoning for Multi-Criteria Evaluation of Open-Ended Responses (Lu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2024.findings-emnlp.101.pdf