LENS: A Learnable Evaluation Metric for Text Simplification

Mounica Maddela, Yao Dou, David Heineman, Wei Xu


Abstract
Training learnable metrics using modern language models has recently emerged as a promising method for the automatic evaluation of machine translation. However, existing human evaluation datasets for text simplification have limited annotations that are based on unitary or outdated models, making them unsuitable for this approach. To address these issues, we introduce the SimpEval corpus that contains: SimpEval_past, comprising 12K human ratings on 2.4K simplifications of 24 past systems, and SimpEval_2022, a challenging simplification benchmark consisting of over 1K human ratings of 360 simplifications including GPT-3.5 generated text. Training on SimpEval, we present LENS, a Learnable Evaluation Metric for Text Simplification. Extensive empirical results show that LENS correlates much better with human judgment than existing metrics, paving the way for future progress in the evaluation of text simplification. We also introduce Rank & Rate, a human evaluation framework that rates simplifications from several models in a list-wise manner using an interactive interface, which ensures both consistency and accuracy in the evaluation process and is used to create the SimpEval datasets.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.905
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:
16383–16408
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.905
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.905
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mounica Maddela, Yao Dou, David Heineman, and Wei Xu. 2023. LENS: A Learnable Evaluation Metric for Text Simplification. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 16383–16408, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LENS: A Learnable Evaluation Metric for Text Simplification (Maddela et al., ACL 2023)
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