A Critical Evaluation of Evaluations for Long-form Question Answering

Fangyuan Xu, Yixiao Song, Mohit Iyyer, Eunsol Choi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Long-form question answering (LFQA) enables answering a wide range of questions, but its flexibility poses enormous challenges for evaluation. We perform the first targeted study of the evaluation of long-form answers, covering both human and automatic evaluation practices. We hire domain experts in seven areas to provide preference judgments over pairs of answers, along with free-form justifications for their choices. We present a careful analysis of experts' evaluation, which focuses on new aspects such as the comprehensiveness of the answer. Next, we examine automatic text generation metrics, finding that no existing metrics are predictive of human preference judgments. However, some metrics correlate with fine-grained aspects of answers (e.g., coherence). We encourage future work to move away from a single “overall score” of the answer and adopt a multi-faceted evaluation, targeting aspects such as factuality and completeness. We publicly release all of our annotations and code to spur future work into LFQA evaluation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationLong Papers
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages3225-3245
Number of pages21
ISBN (Electronic)9781959429722
StatePublished - 2023
Event61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2023 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: Jul 9 2023Jul 14 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume1
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

Conference61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2023
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period7/9/237/14/23

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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