RoMe: A Robust Metric for Evaluating Natural Language Generation

Md Rashad Al Hasan Rony, Liubov Kovriguina, Debanjan Chaudhuri, Ricardo Usbeck, Jens Lehmann


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.387
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5645–5657
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.387
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.387
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Md Rashad Al Hasan Rony, Liubov Kovriguina, Debanjan Chaudhuri, Ricardo Usbeck, and Jens Lehmann. 2022. RoMe: A Robust Metric for Evaluating Natural Language Generation. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5645–5657, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RoMe: A Robust Metric for Evaluating Natural Language Generation (Rony et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2022.acl-long.387.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2022.acl-long.387.mp4
Code
 rashad101/rome
Data
CoLAKELM