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DocAsRef: An Empirical Study on Repurposing Reference-based Summary Quality Metrics as Reference-free Metrics

  • Forrest Sheng Bao
  • , Ruixuan Tu
  • , Ge Luo
  • , Yinfei Yang
  • , Hebi Li
  • , Minghui Qiu
  • , Youbiao He
  • , Cen Chen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Automated summary quality assessment falls into two categories: reference-based and reference-free. Reference-based metrics, historically deemed more accurate due to the additional information provided by human-written references, are limited by their reliance on human input. In this paper, we hypothesize that the comparison methodologies used by some reference-based metrics to evaluate a system summary against its corresponding reference can be effectively adapted to assess it against its source document, thereby transforming these metrics into reference-free ones. Experimental results support this hypothesis. After being repurposed reference-freely, the zero-shot BERTScore using the pretrained DeBERTa-large-MNLI model of <0.5B parameters consistently outperforms its original reference-based version across various aspects on the SummEval and Newsroom datasets. It also excels in comparison to most existing reference-free metrics and closely competes with zero-shot summary evaluators based on GPT-3.5.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationEMNLP 2023
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1226-1235
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9798891760615
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event2023 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 - Hybrid, Singapore
Duration: 6 Dec 202310 Dec 2023

Publication series

NameFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Conference

Conference2023 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Country/TerritorySingapore
CityHybrid
Period6/12/2310/12/23

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