1. A Comparative Study of Quality Evaluation Methods for Text Summarization
- Author
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Nguyen, Huyen, Chen, Haihua, Pobbathi, Lavanya, and Ding, Junhua
- Subjects
Computer Science - Computation and Language ,Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence - Abstract
Evaluating text summarization has been a challenging task in natural language processing (NLP). Automatic metrics which heavily rely on reference summaries are not suitable in many situations, while human evaluation is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a novel method based on large language models (LLMs) for evaluating text summarization. We also conducts a comparative study on eight automatic metrics, human evaluation, and our proposed LLM-based method. Seven different types of state-of-the-art (SOTA) summarization models were evaluated. We perform extensive experiments and analysis on datasets with patent documents. Our results show that LLMs evaluation aligns closely with human evaluation, while widely-used automatic metrics such as ROUGE-2, BERTScore, and SummaC do not and also lack consistency. Based on the empirical comparison, we propose a LLM-powered framework for automatically evaluating and improving text summarization, which is beneficial and could attract wide attention among the community., Comment: The paper is under review at Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2024. It has 15 pages and 4 figures
- Published
- 2024