From Model-centered to Human-Centered: Revision Distance as a Metric for Text Evaluation in LLMs-based Applications

Yongqiang Ma, Lizhi Qing, Jiawei Liu, Yangyang Kang, Yue Zhang, Wei Lu, Xiaozhong Liu, Qikai Cheng


Abstract
Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is fundamental, particularly in the context of practical applications. Conventional evaluation methods, typically designed primarily for LLM development, yield numerical scores that ignore the user experience. Therefore, our study shifts the focus from model-centered to human-centered evaluation in the context of AI-powered writing assistance applications. Our proposed metric, termed “Revision Distance,” utilizes LLMs to suggest revision edits that mimic the human writing process. It is determined by counting the revision edits generated by LLMs. Benefiting from the generated revision edit details, our metric can provide a self-explained text evaluation result in a human-understandable manner beyond the context-independent score. Our results show that for the easy-writing task, “Revision Distance” is consistent with established metrics (ROUGE, Bert-score, and GPT-score), but offers more insightful, detailed feedback and better distinguishes between texts. Moreover, in the context of challenging academic writing tasks, our metric still delivers reliable evaluations where other metrics tend to struggle. Furthermore, our metric also holds significant potential for scenarios lacking reference texts.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.126
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2127–2137
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.126
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.126
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yongqiang Ma, Lizhi Qing, Jiawei Liu, Yangyang Kang, Yue Zhang, Wei Lu, Xiaozhong Liu, and Qikai Cheng. 2024. From Model-centered to Human-Centered: Revision Distance as a Metric for Text Evaluation in LLMs-based Applications. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 2127–2137, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Model-centered to Human-Centered: Revision Distance as a Metric for Text Evaluation in LLMs-based Applications (Ma et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.126.pdf