Cited by 318Topic ModelingAdvanced Text Analysis TechniquesNatural Language Processing Techniques

FEQA: A Question Answering Evaluation Framework for Faithfulness Assessment in Abstractive Summarization

Open access
Durmus, Esin, He, He, Diab, Mona·2020·Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Neural abstractive summarization models are prone to generate content inconsistent with the source document, i.e. unfaithful.Existing automatic metrics do not capture such mistakes effectively.We tackle the problem of evaluating faithfulness of a generated summary given its source document.We first collected human annotations of faithfulness for outputs from numerous models on two datasets.We find that current models exhibit a trade-off between abstractiveness and faithfulness: outputs with less word overlap with the source document are more likely to be unfaithful.Next, we propose an automatic question answering (QA) based metric for faithfulness, FEQA, 1 which leverages recent advances in reading comprehension.Given questionanswer pairs generated from the summary, a QA model extracts answers from the document; non-matched answers indicate unfaithful information in the summary.Among metrics based on word overlap, embedding similarity, and learned language understanding models, our QA-based metric has significantly higher correlation with human faithfulness scores, especially on highly abstractive summaries.* Most of the work is done while the authors were at Amazon Web Services AI.1 Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answering.

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  • Traditional metrics have poor correlation with human judgment in terms of the hallucination problem.

    “A similar phenomenon has been shown in other NLG tasks, where it has been discovered that traditional metrics have a poor correlation with human judgment in terms of the hallucination problem [45, 54, 101, 125].”

    From Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation (2023) · cites this paper as [54]

    Section 4.2 (Results) reports that word-overlap metrics have no correlation with human-annotated faithfulness in the more abstractive XSum setting, supporting the claim for that setting. It also says those metrics are correlated with faithfulness in the more extractive CNN/DM setting, so the unqualified claim of poor correlation overstates the finding. The supplied passages do not give page numbers. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • QA-based reference-free metrics have substantially higher correlations with human judgments of faithfulness than baseline metrics.

    “The results show that these reference-free metrics have substantially higher correlations with human judgments of faithfulness than the baseline metrics.”

    From Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation (2023) · cites this paper as [54]

  • Extracted answers that do not match the provided answers indicate unfaithful information in the summary.

    “The extracted answers that do not match the provided answers indicate unfaithful information in the summary.”

    From Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation (2023) · cites this paper as [54]

  • QA-based metrics have recently garnered attention for their enhanced ability to capture information overlap between the model's generation and its source.

    “In contrast to classifier-based metrics, QA-based metrics [77, 119, 271, 310] have recently garnered attention for their enhanced ability to capture information overlap between the model's generation and its source.”
  • The QG-QA approach is based on the intuition that if a summary is consistent with its source, questions asked on the summary and the source should result in similar answers.

    “Their approach is based on the intuition that if a summary is consistent with its source, questions asked on the summary and the source should result in similar answers.”

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Research works printed but not linked: 34

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Durmus, E., He, H., & Diab, M.
Affiliations
  • Cornell University (US)
  • George Washington University (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Published
2020
Pages
5055-5070
ISSN
0736-587X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3022685184
Cited by
306
References
1
Citations by year
2026: 20 · 2025: 28 · 2024: 28 · 2023: 75 · 2022: 68 · 2021: 71 · 2020: 16
FWCI
21.97
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
Amazon Web Services
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Advanced Text Analysis Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
abstractive summarization, lexical overlap, embedding similarity, reading comprehension

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