Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarization

Yixin Liu, Alexander Fabbri, Jiawen Chen, Yilun Zhao, Simeng Han, Shafiq Joty, Pengfei Liu, Dragomir Radev, Chien-Sheng Wu, Arman Cohan


Abstract
While large language models (LLMs) can already achieve strong performance on standard generic summarization benchmarks, their performance on more complex summarization task settings is less studied. Therefore, we benchmark LLMs on instruction controllable text summarization, where the model input consists of both a source article and a natural language requirement for desired summary characteristics. To this end, we curate an evaluation-only dataset for this task setting and conduct human evaluations of five LLM-based systems to assess their instruction-following capabilities in controllable summarization. We then benchmark LLM-based automatic evaluation for this task with 4 different evaluation protocols and 11 LLMs, resulting in 40 evaluation methods. Our study reveals that instruction controllable text summarization remains a challenging task for LLMs, since (1) all LLMs evaluated still make factual and other types of errors in their summaries; (2) no LLM-based evaluation methods can achieve a strong alignment with human annotators when judging the quality of candidate summaries; (3) different LLMs show large performance gaps in summary generation and evaluation capabilities. We make our collected benchmark InstruSum publicly available to facilitate future research in this direction.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-naacl.280
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4481–4501
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.280
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-naacl.280
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yixin Liu, Alexander Fabbri, Jiawen Chen, Yilun Zhao, Simeng Han, Shafiq Joty, Pengfei Liu, Dragomir Radev, Chien-Sheng Wu, and Arman Cohan. 2024. Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024, pages 4481–4501, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarization (Liu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.280.pdf