<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="li-etal-2026-hypoeval">
    <titleInfo>
        <title>HypoEval: Hypothesis-Guided Evaluation for Natural Language Generation</title>
    </titleInfo>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Mingxuan</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Hanchen</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Chenhao</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Tan</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2026-07</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Maria</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Liakata</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Viviane</namePart>
            <namePart type="given">P</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Moreira</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Jiajun</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">David</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Jurgens</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <originInfo>
            <publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
            <place>
                <placeTerm type="text">San Diego, California, United States</placeTerm>
            </place>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
        <identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-390-6</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <abstract>Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential for automating the evaluation of natural language generation. Previous frameworks of LLM-as-a-judge fall short in two ways: they either use zero-shot setting without consulting any human input, which leads to low alignment, or fine-tune LLMs on labeled data, which requires a non-trivial number of samples. Moreover, previous methods often provide little reasoning behind automated evaluations. In this paper, we propose HypoEval, Hypothesis-guided Evaluation framework, which first uses a small corpus of human evaluations to generate more detailed rubrics for human judgments and then incorporates a checklist-like approach to combine LLM’s assigned scores on each decomposed dimension to acquire overall scores. With only 30 human evaluations, HypoEval achieves state-of-the-art performance in alignment with both human rankings (Spearman correlation) and human scores (Pearson correlation), on average outperforming G-Eval by 11.86% and fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with at least 3 times more human evaluations by 11.95%. Furthermore, we conduct systematic studies to assess the robustness of HypoEval, highlighting its effectiveness as a reliable and interpretable automated evaluation framework.</abstract>
    <identifier type="citekey">li-etal-2026-hypoeval</identifier>
    <location>
        <url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1963/</url>
    </location>
    <part>
        <date>2026-07</date>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>42424</start>
            <end>42443</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>

%0 Conference Proceedings
%T HypoEval: Hypothesis-Guided Evaluation for Natural Language Generation
%A Li, Mingxuan
%A Li, Hanchen
%A Tan, Chenhao
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F li-etal-2026-hypoeval
%X Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential for automating the evaluation of natural language generation. Previous frameworks of LLM-as-a-judge fall short in two ways: they either use zero-shot setting without consulting any human input, which leads to low alignment, or fine-tune LLMs on labeled data, which requires a non-trivial number of samples. Moreover, previous methods often provide little reasoning behind automated evaluations. In this paper, we propose HypoEval, Hypothesis-guided Evaluation framework, which first uses a small corpus of human evaluations to generate more detailed rubrics for human judgments and then incorporates a checklist-like approach to combine LLM’s assigned scores on each decomposed dimension to acquire overall scores. With only 30 human evaluations, HypoEval achieves state-of-the-art performance in alignment with both human rankings (Spearman correlation) and human scores (Pearson correlation), on average outperforming G-Eval by 11.86% and fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with at least 3 times more human evaluations by 11.95%. Furthermore, we conduct systematic studies to assess the robustness of HypoEval, highlighting its effectiveness as a reliable and interpretable automated evaluation framework.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1963/
%P 42424-42443

Markdown (Informal)

[HypoEval: Hypothesis-Guided Evaluation for Natural Language Generation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1963/) (Li et al., ACL 2026)

• HypoEval: Hypothesis-Guided Evaluation for Natural Language Generation (Li et al., ACL 2026)

ACL

• Mingxuan Li, Hanchen Li, and Chenhao Tan. 2026. HypoEval: Hypothesis-Guided Evaluation for Natural Language Generation. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 42424–42443, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.