Return of EM: Entity-driven Answer Set Expansion for QA Evaluation

Dongryeol Lee, Minwoo Lee, Kyungmin Min, Joonsuk Park, Kyomin Jung


Abstract
Recently, directly using large language models (LLMs) has been shown to be the most reliable method to evaluate QA models. However, it suffers from limited interpretability, high cost, and environmental harm. To address these, we propose to use soft exact match (EM) with entity-driven answer set expansion. Our approach expands the gold answer set to include diverse surface forms, based on the observation that the surface forms often follow particular patterns depending on the entity type. The experimental results show that our method outperforms traditional evaluation methods by a large margin. Moreover, the reliability of our evaluation method is comparable to that of LLM-based ones, while offering the benefits of high interpretability and reduced environmental harm.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.743
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11218–11234
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.743/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dongryeol Lee, Minwoo Lee, Kyungmin Min, Joonsuk Park, and Kyomin Jung. 2025. Return of EM: Entity-driven Answer Set Expansion for QA Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 11218–11234, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Return of EM: Entity-driven Answer Set Expansion for QA Evaluation (Lee et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.743.pdf