Cited by 55Natural Language Processing TechniquesTopic ModelingSpeech and dialogue systems

Evaluating the Evaluation of Diversity in Natural Language Generation

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Tevet, Guy, Berant, Jonathan·2021·Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

Abstract

Despite growing interest in natural language generation (NLG) models that produce diverse outputs, there is currently no principled method for evaluating the diversity of an NLG system.In this work, we propose a framework for evaluating diversity metrics.The framework measures the correlation between a proposed diversity metric and a diversity parameter, a single parameter that controls some aspect of diversity in generated text.For example, a diversity parameter might be a binary variable used to instruct crowdsourcing workers to generate text with either low or high content diversity.We demonstrate the utility of our framework by: (a) establishing best practices for eliciting diversity judgments from humans, (b) showing that humans substantially outperform automatic metrics in estimating content diversity, and (c) demonstrating that existing methods for controlling diversity by tuning a "decoding parameter" mostly affect form but not meaning.Our framework can advance the understanding of different diversity metrics, an essential step on the road towards better NLG systems.

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  • The diversity metrics (distinct N-grams, Sentence-BERT, NLI) align well with human diversity evaluations and underlying diversity generators.

    “All of these metrics have been shown to align well with human diversity evaluations and with underlying diversity generators by Tevet & Berant (2021).”

    From Understanding the Effects of RLHF on LLM Generalisation and Diversity (2023) · cites this paper as Tevet & Berant (2021)

    The paper’s Set B overview reports that n-gram metrics correlate well with decoding parameters, and its Results section finds that neural metrics—especially Sentence-BERT—perform better on content diversity. But the Results also say n-gram metrics perform poorly on content diversity and humans substantially outperform every automatic metric; the claim that all these metrics align well with human evaluations is therefore overstated. The paper identifies an NLI-trained Sentence-BERT model, not a separately evaluated NLI metric. Page numbers were not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.88)

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Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. Jiwei Li, Michel Galley, Chris Brockett, Jianfeng Gao, and Bill Dolan. 2016a. A diversity-promoting ob- jective function for neural conversation models. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computa- tional Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 110-119.

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Authors
Tevet, G., & Berant, J.
Affiliations
Tel Aviv University (IL)
Venue
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Published
2021
Pages
326-346
OpenAlex
W3015962271
Cited by
52
References
41
Citations by year
2026: 6 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 3
FWCI
3.23
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • European Commission
  • Israel Science Foundation
  • H2020 European Research Council (802800)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
Keywords
natural language generation, output diversity, diversity indices, content diversity, crowdsourcing

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