CoUDA: Coherence Evaluation via Unified Data Augmentation

Dawei Zhu, Wenhao Wu, Yifan Song, Fangwei Zhu, Ziqiang Cao, Sujian Li


Abstract
Coherence evaluation aims to assess the organization and structure of a discourse, which remains challenging even in the era of large language models. Due to the scarcity of annotated data, data augmentation is commonly used for training coherence evaluation models. However, previous augmentations for this task primarily rely on heuristic rules, lacking designing criteria as guidance.In this paper, we take inspiration from linguistic theory of discourse structure, and propose a data augmentation framework named CoUDA. CoUDA breaks down discourse coherence into global and local aspects, and designs augmentation strategies for both aspects, respectively.Especially for local coherence, we propose a novel generative strategy for constructing augmentation samples, which involves post-pretraining a generative model and applying two controlling mechanisms to control the difficulty of generated samples. During inference, CoUDA also jointly evaluates both global and local aspects to comprehensively assess the overall coherence of a discourse.Extensive experiments in coherence evaluation show that, with only 233M parameters, CoUDA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both pointwise scoring and pairwise ranking tasks, even surpassing recent GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 based metrics.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.55
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
967–978
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.55
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dawei Zhu, Wenhao Wu, Yifan Song, Fangwei Zhu, Ziqiang Cao, and Sujian Li. 2024. CoUDA: Coherence Evaluation via Unified Data Augmentation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 967–978, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CoUDA: Coherence Evaluation via Unified Data Augmentation (Zhu et al., NAACL 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.55.pdf
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