Revisiting the Gold Standard: Grounding Summarization Evaluation with Robust Human Evaluation
Yixin Liu, Alex Fabbri, Pengfei Liu, Yilun Zhao, Linyong Nan, Ruilin Han, Simeng Han, Shafiq Joty, Chien-Sheng Wu, Caiming Xiong, Dragomir Radev
Abstract
Human evaluation is the foundation upon which the evaluation of both summarization systems and automatic metrics rests. However, existing human evaluation studies for summarization either exhibit a low inter-annotator agreement or have insufficient scale, and an in-depth analysis of human evaluation is lacking. Therefore, we address the shortcomings of existing summarization evaluation along the following axes: (1) We propose a modified summarization salience protocol, Atomic Content Units (ACUs), which is based on fine-grained semantic units and allows for a high inter-annotator agreement. (2) We curate the Robust Summarization Evaluation (RoSE) benchmark, a large human evaluation dataset consisting of 22,000 summary-level annotations over 28 top-performing systems on three datasets. (3) We conduct a comparative study of four human evaluation protocols, underscoring potential confounding factors in evaluation setups. (4) We evaluate 50 automatic metrics and their variants using the collected human annotations across evaluation protocols and demonstrate how our benchmark leads to more statistically stable and significant results. The metrics we benchmarked include recent methods based on large language models (LLMs), GPTScore and G-Eval. Furthermore, our findings have important implications for evaluating LLMs, as we show that LLMs adjusted by human feedback (e.g., GPT-3.5) may overfit unconstrained human evaluation, which is affected by the annotators’ prior, input-agnostic preferences, calling for more robust, targeted evaluation methods.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-long.228
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4140–4170
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.228
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.228
- Cite (ACL):
- Yixin Liu, Alex Fabbri, Pengfei Liu, Yilun Zhao, Linyong Nan, Ruilin Han, Simeng Han, Shafiq Joty, Chien-Sheng Wu, Caiming Xiong, and Dragomir Radev. 2023. Revisiting the Gold Standard: Grounding Summarization Evaluation with Robust Human Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4140–4170, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Revisiting the Gold Standard: Grounding Summarization Evaluation with Robust Human Evaluation (Liu et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2023.acl-long.228.pdf