X-ACE: Explainable and Multi-factor Audio Captioning Evaluation

Qian Wang, Jia-Chen Gu, Zhen-Hua Ling


Abstract
Automated audio captioning (AAC) aims to generate descriptions based on audio input, attracting exploration of emerging audio language models (ALMs). However, current evaluation metrics only provide a single score to assess the overall quality of captions without characterizing the nuanced difference by systematically going through an evaluation checklist. To this end, we propose the explainable and multi-factor audio captioning evaluation (X-ACE) paradigm. X-ACE identifies four main factors that constitute the majority of audio features, specifically sound event, source, attribute and relation. To assess a given caption from an ALM, it is firstly transformed into an audio graph, where each node denotes an entity in the caption and corresponds to a factor. On the one hand, graph matching is conducted from part to whole for a holistic assessment. On the other hand, the nodes contained within each factor are aggregated to measure the factor-level performance. The pros and cons of an ALM can be explicitly and clearly demonstrated through X-ACE, pointing out the direction for further improvements. Experiments show that X-ACE exhibits better correlation with human perception and can detect mismatches sensitively.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.729
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12273–12287
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.729
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qian Wang, Jia-Chen Gu, and Zhen-Hua Ling. 2024. X-ACE: Explainable and Multi-factor Audio Captioning Evaluation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 12273–12287, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
X-ACE: Explainable and Multi-factor Audio Captioning Evaluation (Wang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.729.pdf