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arXiv · 1809.08731

Sentence-Level Fluency Evaluation: References Help, But Can Be Spared!

Katharina Kann·Sascha Rothe·Katja Filippova
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Abstract

Motivated by recent findings on the probabilistic modeling of acceptability judgments, we propose syntactic log-odds ratio (SLOR), a normalized language model score, as a metric for referenceless fluency evaluation of natural language generation output at the sentence level. We further introduce WPSLOR, a novel WordPiece-based version, which harnesses a more compact language model. Even though word-overlap metrics like ROUGE are computed with the help of hand-written references, our referenceless methods obtain a significantly higher correlation with human fluency scores on a benchmark dataset of compressed sentences. Finally, we present ROUGE-LM, a reference-based metric which is a natural extension of WPSLOR to the case of available references. We show that ROUGE-LM yields a significantly higher correlation with human judgments than all baseline metrics, including WPSLOR on its own.

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Katharina Kann, Sascha Rothe, Katja Filippova. 2018-09-24. Sentence-Level Fluency Evaluation: References Help, But Can Be Spared!. https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08731

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