Metrics also Disagree in the Low Scoring Range: Revisiting Summarization Evaluation Metrics
Manik Bhandari, Pranav Narayan Gour, Atabak Ashfaq, Pengfei Liu
Abstract
In text summarization, evaluating the efficacy of automatic metrics without human judgments has become recently popular. One exemplar work (Peyrard, 2019) concludes that automatic metrics strongly disagree when ranking high-scoring summaries. In this paper, we revisit their experiments and find that their observations stem from the fact that metrics disagree in ranking summaries from any narrow scoring range. We hypothesize that this may be because summaries are similar to each other in a narrow scoring range and are thus, difficult to rank. Apart from the width of the scoring range of summaries, we analyze three other properties that impact inter-metric agreement - Ease of Summarization, Abstractiveness, and Coverage.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{bhandari-etal-2020-metrics,
title = "Metrics also Disagree in the Low Scoring Range: Revisiting Summarization Evaluation Metrics",
author = "Bhandari, Manik and
Gour, Pranav Narayan and
Ashfaq, Atabak and
Liu, Pengfei",
editor = "Scott, Donia and
Bel, Nuria and
Zong, Chengqing",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = dec,
year = "2020",
address = "Barcelona, Spain (Online)",
publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.501/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.501",
pages = "5702--5711"
}