Beyond Traditional Benchmarks: Analyzing Behaviors of Open LLMs on Data-to-Text Generation

Zdeněk Kasner, Ondrej Dusek


Abstract
We analyze the behaviors of open large language models (LLMs) on the task of data-to-text (D2T) generation, i.e., generating coherent and relevant text from structured data. To avoid the issue of LLM training data contamination with standard benchmarks, we design Quintd - a tool for collecting novel structured data records from public APIs. We find that open LLMs (Llama 2, Mistral, and Zephyr) can generate fluent and coherent texts in zero-shot settings from data in common formats collected with Quintd. However, we show that the semantic accuracy of the outputs is a major issue: both according to human annotators and our reference-free metric based on GPT-4, more than 80% of the outputs of open LLMs contain at least one semantic error. We publicly release the code, data, and model outputs.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.651
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12045–12072
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.651
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.651
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zdeněk Kasner and Ondrej Dusek. 2024. Beyond Traditional Benchmarks: Analyzing Behaviors of Open LLMs on Data-to-Text Generation. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12045–12072, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Traditional Benchmarks: Analyzing Behaviors of Open LLMs on Data-to-Text Generation (Kasner & Dusek, ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2024.acl-long.651.pdf