Measuring the Measuring Tools: An Automatic Evaluation of Semantic Metrics for Text Corpora

George Kour, Samuel Ackerman, Eitan Daniel Farchi, Orna Raz, Boaz Carmeli, Ateret Anaby Tavor


Abstract
Similarity metrics for text corpora are becoming critical due to the tremendous growth in the number of generative models. These similarity metrics measure the semantic gap between human and machine-generated text on the corpus level. However, standard methods for evaluating the characteristics of these metrics have yet to be established. We propose a set of automatic measures for evaluating the characteristics of semantic similarity metrics for text corpora. Our measures allow us to sensibly compare and identify the strengths and weaknesses of these metrics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our evaluation measures in capturing fundamental characteristics by comparing it to a collection of classical and state-of-the-art metrics. Our measures revealed that recent metrics are becoming better in identifying semantic distributional mismatch while classical metrics are more sensitive to perturbations in the surface text levels.
Anthology ID:
2022.gem-1.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Antoine Bosselut, Khyathi Chandu, Kaustubh Dhole, Varun Gangal, Sebastian Gehrmann, Yacine Jernite, Jekaterina Novikova, Laura Perez-Beltrachini
Venue:
GEM
SIG:
SIGGEN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
405–416
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.gem-1.35
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.gem-1.35
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
George Kour, Samuel Ackerman, Eitan Daniel Farchi, Orna Raz, Boaz Carmeli, and Ateret Anaby Tavor. 2022. Measuring the Measuring Tools: An Automatic Evaluation of Semantic Metrics for Text Corpora. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM), pages 405–416, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Measuring the Measuring Tools: An Automatic Evaluation of Semantic Metrics for Text Corpora (Kour et al., GEM 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.gem-1.35.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.gem-1.35.mp4