What are the Desired Characteristics of Calibration Sets? Identifying Correlates on Long Form Scientific Summarization
Griffin Adams, Bichlien Nguyen, Jake Smith, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Anna Ostropolets, Budhaditya Deb, Yuan-Jyue Chen, Tristan Naumann, Noémie Elhadad
Abstract
Summarization models often generate text that is poorly calibrated to quality metrics because they are trained to maximize the likelihood of a single reference (MLE). To address this, recent work has added a calibration step, which exposes a model to its own ranked outputs to improve relevance or, in a separate line of work, contrasts positive and negative sets to improve faithfulness. While effective, much of this work has focused on how to generate and optimize these sets. Less is known about why one setup is more effective than another. In this work, we uncover the underlying characteristics of effective sets. For each training instance, we form a large, diverse pool of candidates and systematically vary the subsets used for calibration fine-tuning. Each selection strategy targets distinct aspects of the sets, such as lexical diversity or the size of the gap between positive and negatives. On three diverse scientific long-form summarization datasets (spanning biomedical, clinical, and chemical domains), we find, among others, that faithfulness calibration is optimal when the negative sets are extractive and more likely to be generated, whereas for relevance calibration, the metric margin between candidates should be maximized and surprise–the disagreement between model and metric defined candidate rankings–minimized.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-long.587
- 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:
- 10520–10542
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.587
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.587
- Cite (ACL):
- Griffin Adams, Bichlien Nguyen, Jake Smith, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Anna Ostropolets, Budhaditya Deb, Yuan-Jyue Chen, Tristan Naumann, and Noémie Elhadad. 2023. What are the Desired Characteristics of Calibration Sets? Identifying Correlates on Long Form Scientific Summarization. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10520–10542, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- What are the Desired Characteristics of Calibration Sets? Identifying Correlates on Long Form Scientific Summarization (Adams et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.acl-long.587.pdf