Large Language Models (LLMs) are being tested as a cost‑effective alternative to human judgment for evaluating machine translation (MT). This study compares LLM agreement with human annotators on two MT quality schemes—Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and Error Span Annotation (ESA)—across 70 language pairs and public WMT23/25 data. Results show that while LLMs sometimes match or exceed human agreement, performance varies widely by scheme, language, and domain, and remains unreliable in many settings. The work also identifies specific challenges for both humans (e.g., fine‑grained MQM, low‑resource languages) and LLMs (e.g., minor errors, wrong language variants, span annotation).
By Hala Almaghout, Christian Federmann, Qin Gao
arXiv:2610.19166v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Meta-evaluation of text generation metrics and LLM-judges is primarily conducted using metric-human correlations. However, prior work has shown that co...
By Anubhav Jangra, Adrian de Wynter
The LLM-as-a-judge (LLMaJ) framework has emerged as a promising solution for cheap, reproducible, reference-free Natural Language Generation (NLG) evaluation. Prior work seeks to improve LLMaJ by deco...
QoNext is a new framework that applies Quality of Experience (QoE) principles from networking and multimedia to evaluate foundation models in a conversational setting. It identifies experiential factors that influence user experience, collects human ratings in controlled interaction scenarios, and builds a database and neural predictor to estimate user satisfaction from system parameters. The framework demonstrates the ability to decode the mechanisms of user satisfaction and predict human sentiment across varied service conditions.
By Yijin Guo, Farong Wen, Ye Shen, Junying Wang, Qi Jia, Xiaohong Liu, Zicheng Zhang, Guangtao Zhai
The paper introduces UPHELD, a large benchmark of human-to-human dialogues written by professional script writers, featuring realistic turn densities and over 36,000 per-turn human annotations. It evaluates existing automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-judge methods, finding them unreliable against expert human judgment. Using UPHELD, the authors develop a Mixture-of-Judges framework that improves correlation with human assessments by about 30%.
By Ilija Subasic, Andrew Rabinovich, Zhao Chen
The paper evaluates whether breaking down evaluation tasks into simpler sub‑tasks improves the LLM-as-a-judge (LLMaJ) framework for reference‑free NLG assessment. Systematic comparisons across multiple datasets show no performance advantage for LLMaJ methods that use task decomposition over a fair baseline that does not. The authors attribute previously reported gains to the use of human labels for training rather than to decomposition itself, and note that LLMaJ without decomposition can match human annotators when such labels are available.
By Sebastian Steindl, Nikos Voskarides, Alberto Gasparin, Diego Marcheggiani