Sentence Pair Embeddings Based Evaluation Metric for Abstractive and Extractive Summarization

Ramya Akula, Ivan Garibay


Abstract
The development of an automatic evaluation metric remains an open problem in text generation. Widely used evaluation metrics, like ROUGE and BLEU, are based on exact word matching and fail to capture semantic similarity. Recent works, such as BERTScore, MoverScore and, Sentence Mover’s Similarity, are an improvement over these standard metrics as they use the contextualized word or sentence embeddings to capture semantic similarity. We in this work, propose a novel evaluation metric, Sentence Pair EmbEDdings (SPEED) Score, for text generation which is based on semantic similarity between sentence pairs as opposed to earlier approaches. To find semantic similarity between a pair of sentences, we obtain sentence-level embeddings from multiple transformer models pre-trained specifically on various sentence pair tasks such as Paraphrase Detection (PD), Semantic Text Similarity (STS), and Natural Language Inference (NLI). As these sentence pair tasks involve capturing the semantic similarity between a pair of input texts, we leverage these models in our metric computation. Our proposed evaluation metric shows an impressive performance in evaluating both abstractive and extractive summarization models and achieves state-of-the-art results on the SummEval dataset, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Also, we perform the run-time analysis to show that our proposed metric is faster than the current state-of-the-art.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.646
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6009–6017
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.646
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ramya Akula and Ivan Garibay. 2022. Sentence Pair Embeddings Based Evaluation Metric for Abstractive and Extractive Summarization. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6009–6017, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Sentence Pair Embeddings Based Evaluation Metric for Abstractive and Extractive Summarization (Akula & Garibay, LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.646.pdf
Data
MRPCSummEval