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

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


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.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.87
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1226–1235
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.87
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.87
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Forrest Bao, Ruixuan Tu, Ge Luo, Yinfei Yang, Hebi Li, Minghui Qiu, Youbiao He, and Cen Chen. 2023. DocAsRef: An Empirical Study on Repurposing Reference-based Summary Quality Metrics as Reference-free Metrics. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 1226–1235, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DocAsRef: An Empirical Study on Repurposing Reference-based Summary Quality Metrics as Reference-free Metrics (Bao et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.87.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.87.mp4