Evaluation of Text Generation: A Survey Evaluation of Text Generation: A Survey Asli Celikyilmaz
[email protected] Facebook AI Research Elizabeth Clark
[email protected] University of Washington Jianfeng Gao
[email protected] Microsoft Research Abstract The paper surveys evaluation methods of natural language generation (NLG) systems that have been developed in the last few years. We group NLG evaluation methods into three categories: (1) human-centric evaluation metrics, (2) automatic metrics that require no training, and (3) machine-learned metrics. For each category, we discuss the progress that has been made and the challenges still being faced, with a focus on the evaluation of recently proposed NLG tasks and neural NLG models. We then present two examples for task-specific NLG evaluations for automatic text summarization and long text generation, and conclude the paper by proposing future research directions.1 1. Introduction Natural language generation (NLG), a sub-field of natural language processing (NLP), deals with building software systems that can produce coherent and readable text (Reiter & Dale, 2000a) NLG is commonly considered a general term which encompasses a wide range of tasks that take a form of input (e.g., a structured input like a dataset or a table, a natural language prompt or even an image) and output a sequence of text that is coherent and understandable by humans. Hence, the field of NLG can be applied to a broad range of NLP tasks, such as generating responses to user questions in a chatbot, translating a sentence or a document from one language into another, offering suggestions to help write a story, or generating summaries of time-intensive data analysis.