Estimating Summary Quality with Pairwise Preferences

Markus Zopf


Abstract
Automatic evaluation systems in the field of automatic summarization have been relying on the availability of gold standard summaries for over ten years. Gold standard summaries are expensive to obtain and often require the availability of domain experts to achieve high quality. In this paper, we propose an alternative evaluation approach based on pairwise preferences of sentences. In comparison to gold standard summaries, they are simpler and cheaper to obtain. In our experiments, we show that humans are able to provide useful feedback in the form of pairwise preferences. The new framework performs better than the three most popular versions of ROUGE with less expensive human input. We also show that our framework can reuse already available evaluation data and achieve even better results.
Anthology ID:
N18-1152
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1687–1696
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1152
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1152
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Markus Zopf. 2018. Estimating Summary Quality with Pairwise Preferences. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 1687–1696, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Estimating Summary Quality with Pairwise Preferences (Zopf, NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1152.pdf