Majid Komeili


2023

pdf bib
Reference-Free Summarization Evaluation with Large Language Models
Abbas Akkasi | Kathleen Fraser | Majid Komeili
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Systems

With the continuous advancement in unsupervised learning methodologies, text generation has become increasingly pervasive. However, the evaluation of the quality of the generated text remains challenging. Human annotations are expensive and often show high levels of disagreement, in particular for certain tasks characterized by inherent subjectivity, such as translation and summarization.Consequently, the demand for automated metrics that can reliably assess the quality of such generative systems and their outputs has grown more pronounced than ever. In 2023, Eval4NLP organized a shared task dedicated to the automatic evaluation of outputs from two specific categories of generative systems: machine translation and summarization. This evaluation was achieved through the utilization of prompts with Large Language Models. Participating in the summarization evaluation track, we propose an approach that involves prompting LLMs to evaluate six different latent dimensions of summarization quality. In contrast to many previous approaches to summarization assessments, which emphasize lexical overlap with reference text, this method surfaces the importance of correct syntax in summarization evaluation. Our method resulted in the second-highest performance in this shared task, demonstrating its effectiveness as a reference-free evaluation.