Transparent Reference-free Automated Evaluation of Open-Ended User Survey Responses

Subin An, Yugyeong Ji, Junyoung Kim, Heejin Kook, Yang Lu, Josh Seltzer


Abstract
Open-ended survey responses provide valuable insights in marketing research, but low-quality responses not only burden researchers with manual filtering but also risk leading to misleading conclusions, underscoring the need for effective evaluation. Existing automatic evaluation methods target LLM-generated text and inadequately assess human-written responses with their distinct characteristics. To address such characteristics, we propose a two-stage evaluation framework specifically designed for human survey responses. First, gibberish filtering removes nonsensical responses. Then, three dimensions—effort, relevance, and complete- ness—are evaluated using LLM capabilities, grounded in empirical analysis of real-world survey data. Validation on English and Korean datasets shows that our framework not only outperforms existing metrics but also demonstrates high practical applicability for real-world applications such as response quality prediction and response rejection, showing strong correlations with expert assessment.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-industry.65
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou (China)
Editors:
Saloni Potdar, Lina Rojas-Barahona, Sebastien Montella
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
963–982
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-industry.65/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Subin An, Yugyeong Ji, Junyoung Kim, Heejin Kook, Yang Lu, and Josh Seltzer. 2025. Transparent Reference-free Automated Evaluation of Open-Ended User Survey Responses. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 963–982, Suzhou (China). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Transparent Reference-free Automated Evaluation of Open-Ended User Survey Responses (An et al., EMNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-industry.65.pdf