REFeREE: A REference-FREE Model-Based Metric for Text Simplification

Yichen Huang; Ekaterina Kochmar

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arXiv · 2403.17640

REFeREE: A REference-FREE Model-Based Metric for Text Simplification

Yichen Huang·Ekaterina Kochmar

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Abstract

Text simplification lacks a universal standard of quality, and annotated reference simplifications are scarce and costly. We propose to alleviate such limitations by introducing REFeREE, a reference-free model-based metric with a 3-stage curriculum. REFeREE leverages an arbitrarily scalable pretraining stage and can be applied to any quality standard as long as a small number of human annotations are available. Our experiments show that our metric outperforms existing reference-based metrics in predicting overall ratings and reaches competitive and consistent performance in predicting specific ratings while requiring no reference simplifications at inference time.

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Yichen Huang, Ekaterina Kochmar. 2024-03-26. REFeREE: A REference-FREE Model-Based Metric for Text Simplification. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17640

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