ReproHum: #0033-03: How Reproducible Are Fluency Ratings of Generated Text? A Reproduction of August et al. 2022

Emiel van Miltenburg, Anouck Braggaar, Nadine Braun, Martijn Goudbeek, Emiel Krahmer, Chris van der Lee, Steffen Pauws, Frédéric Tomas


Abstract
In earlier work, August et al. (2022) evaluated three different Natural Language Generation systems on their ability to generate fluent, relevant, and factual scientific definitions. As part of the ReproHum project (Belz et al., 2023), we carried out a partial reproduction study of their human evaluation procedure, focusing on human fluency ratings. Following the standardised ReproHum procedure, our reproduction study follows the original study as closely as possible, with two raters providing 300 ratings each. In addition to this, we carried out a second study where we collected ratings from eight additional raters and analysed the variability of the ratings. We successfully reproduced the inferential statistics from the original study (i.e. the same hypotheses were supported), albeit with a lower inter-annotator agreement. The remainder of our paper shows significant variation between different raters, raising questions about what it really means to reproduce human evaluation studies.
Anthology ID:
2024.humeval-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems (HumEval) @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Simone Balloccu, Anya Belz, Rudali Huidrom, Ehud Reiter, Joao Sedoc, Craig Thomson
Venues:
HumEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
132–144
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.humeval-1.13
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Emiel van Miltenburg, Anouck Braggaar, Nadine Braun, Martijn Goudbeek, Emiel Krahmer, Chris van der Lee, Steffen Pauws, and Frédéric Tomas. 2024. ReproHum: #0033-03: How Reproducible Are Fluency Ratings of Generated Text? A Reproduction of August et al. 2022. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems (HumEval) @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 132–144, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
ReproHum: #0033-03: How Reproducible Are Fluency Ratings of Generated Text? A Reproduction of August et al. 2022 (van Miltenburg et al., HumEval-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.humeval-1.13.pdf