Cited by 245Natural Language Processing TechniquesTopic ModelingSpeech and dialogue systems

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 45 of the 45 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 7 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Is ChatGPT a Good NLG Evaluator? A Preliminary Study

Open access
Wang, Jiaan, Liang, Yunlong, Meng, Fandong, Sun, Zengkui, Shi, Haoxiang, Li, Zhixu, Xu, Jinan, Qu, Jianfeng, Zhou, Jie·2023·Proceedings of the 4th New Frontiers in Summarization Workshop

Abstract

Recently, the emergence of ChatGPT has attracted wide attention from the computational linguistics community.Many prior studies have shown that ChatGPT achieves remarkable performance on various NLP tasks in terms of automatic evaluation metrics.However, the ability of ChatGPT to serve as an evaluation metric is still underexplored.Considering assessing the quality of natural language generation (NLG) models is an arduous task and NLG metrics notoriously show their poor correlation with human judgments, we wonder whether Chat-GPT is a good NLG evaluation metric.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This preliminary meta-evaluation prompts ChatGPT as an NLG evaluator with task- and aspect-specific instructions and tests its correlation with human judgments on five meta-evaluation datasets. It finds ChatGPT achieves state-of-the-art or competitive correlations in most cases, but its effectiveness is prompt-sensitive and can be undermined by reference-oriented dataset biases.

Key findings

  • On SummEval, ChatGPT achieves new state-of-the-art correlation in most aspects; ChatGPT (Stars w/ ref) reaches average sample-level Spearman 0.411 (Table 1).
  • On OpenMEVA story generation, ChatGPT achieves the best performance; ChatGPT (DA w/o ref) reaches 0.507 sample-level Spearman correlation, while PPL reaches only 0.324.
  • On RealSumm, ChatGPT underperforms similarity metrics; ChatGPT (Stars w/ ref) reaches 0.195 sample-level Spearman correlation versus ROUGE-1 at 0.498, which the paper attributes to reference-oriented pyramid annotation bias.
  • On NewsRoom, ChatGPT outperforms ROUGE and BERTScore by a large margin; ChatGPT (DA w/o ref) reaches average sample-level Spearman 0.504 versus ROUGE-1 at 0.119 and BERTScore at 0.152. On BAGEL, ChatGPT obtains competitive correlations.

Methods

  • Meta-evaluation on five NLG meta-evaluation datasets: SummEval, NewsRoom, and RealSumm for summarization; OpenMEVA-ROC for story generation; BAGEL for data-to-text generation.
  • ChatGPT is prompted as a human evaluator with task-specific and aspect-specific instructions, using reference-free and reference-based settings, and direct assessment (0–100) or one-to-five stars prompts.
  • Compared against ROUGE-1/2/L, BERTScore, MoverScore, PRISM, BARTScore variants, and PPL; correlations are measured with Spearman, Pearson, and Kendall’s Tau at sample and dataset levels.

Limitations

  • Stated: ChatGPT’s performance is prompt-sensitive; experiments miss mainstream NLG tasks such as dialogue and report generation; no official API was available, so experiments used the ChatGPT website with default temperature and are difficult to reproduce; only English datasets are used; correlation depends on the quality and challenge of the meta-evaluation datasets, which are traditional pre-LLM datasets.
  • Evident from the text: this is a preliminary report with limited task and dataset coverage, and the lack of an official API/default temperature implies non-deterministic, version-dependent results.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2023.newsum-1.1

Cites

45 of 45 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Figures

Figure 1 Prompting ChatGPT as an evaluator to score the generated results of NLG models (taking news summarization as an example).
Figure 1 Prompting ChatGPT as an evaluator to score the generated results of NLG models (taking news summarization as an example).CC-BY · From the PDF

Verification

Claims the paper makes

17 Own result · 10 Own interpretation · 6 Not checked yet · 5 No basis given · 4 Own method

Verify all 7 references — free account
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 12
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 12
21 of 21
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The ability of ChatGPT to serve as an evaluation metric is still underexplored.

    “However, the ability of ChatGPT to serve as an evaluation metric is still underexplored.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The automated assessment of the general generation quality of NLG models still remains underexplored.

    “However, the automated assessment of the general generation quality of NLG models still remains underexplored.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The human judgments in the meta-evaluation datasets are reliable enough to serve as ground truth for evaluating NLG metrics.

    “SummEval collects 16 modelgenerated summaries on the CNN/DM dataset and annotates human judgments upon these summaries covering aspects of coherence, relevance, consistency and fluency.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The five meta-evaluation datasets are representative of NLG tasks and suitable for evaluating general NLG metrics.

    “We conduct experiments on five NLG metaevaluation datasets (including summarization, story generation and data-to-text tasks).”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    For a given beginning of a story, various generated storylines and different plots could satisfy people.

    “for a given beginning of a story, various generated storylines and different plots could satisfy people.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Human judgments are a valid gold standard for evaluating NLG metrics.

    “ChatGPT achieves the new state-of-theart correlations (with human judgments) on Sum-mEval and OpenMEVA meta-evaluation datasets”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The task-specific and aspect-specific prompts used are adequate to elicit ChatGPT's NLG evaluation capability.

    “To this end, we design task-specific as well as aspectspecific prompts to guide ChatGPT to perform as an NLG metric.”
7 of 7

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

3 of 3

Citations

Cites

Show all 42 references

Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. Mavuto M Mukaka. 2012. A guide to appropriate use of correlation coefficient in medical research. Malawi medical journal, 24(3):69-71.
  2. Kishore Papineni, Salim Roukos, Todd Ward, and Wei- Jing Zhu. 2002. Bleu: A method for automatic evalu- ation of machine translation. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting on Association for Computa- tional Linguistics, ACL '02, page 311-318, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  3. Jiaan Wang, Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng, Zhixu Li, Jianfeng Qu, and Jie Zhou. 2023a. Cross-lingual summarization via chatgpt. arXiv preprint.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

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Metadata

Authors
Wang, J., Liang, Y., Meng, F., Sun, Z., Shi, H., Li, Z., Xu, J., Qu, J., & Zhou, J.
Affiliations
  • Soochow University (CN)
  • Beijing Jiaotong University (CN)
  • Tencent (China) (CN)
  • Waseda University (JP)
  • Fudan University (CN)
Venue
Proceedings of the 4th New Frontiers in Summarization Workshop
Published
2023
Pages
1-11
OpenAlex
W4389519239
Cited by
235
References
42
Citations by year
2026: 43 · 2025: 65 · 2024: 75 · 2023: 52
FWCI
41.64
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization (NewSum) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
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
ChatGPT, natural language generation, automatic evaluation metrics, large language models, human judgment correlation

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