@inproceedings{laban-etal-2022-near,
    title = "Near-Negative Distinction: Giving a Second Life to Human Evaluation Datasets",
    author = "Laban, Philippe  and
      Wu, Chien-Sheng  and
      Liu, Wenhao  and
      Xiong, Caiming",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = dec,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.135",
    pages = "2094--2108",
    abstract = "Precisely assessing the progress in natural language generation (NLG) tasks is challenging, and human evaluation to establish a preference in a model{'}s output over another is often necessary.However, human evaluation is usually costly, difficult to reproduce, and non-reusable.In this paper, we propose a new and simple automatic evaluation method for NLG called Near-Negative Distinction (NND) that repurposes prior human annotations into NND tests.In an NND test, an NLG model must place a higher likelihood on a high-quality output candidate than on a near-negative candidate with a known error.Model performance is established by the number of NND tests a model passes, as well as the distribution over task-specific errors the model fails on.Through experiments on three NLG tasks (question generation, question answering, and summarization), we show that NND achieves a higher correlation with human judgments than standard NLG evaluation metrics. We then illustrate NND evaluation in four practical scenarios, for example performing fine-grain model analysis, or studying model training dynamics. Our findings suggest that NND can give a second life to human annotations and provide low-cost NLG evaluation.",
}