arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Apples to Apples? Towards Comparable Crosslingual Language Model Evaluation

The paper investigates how to fairly compare language models across languages, noting that current evaluation methods vary widely and lack empirical validation. By training controlled monolingual models on parallel data and testing multilingual LLMs, the authors find that many normalized metrics suffer from biases due to tokenization, encoding, and orthographic differences. Instead, they recommend using sentence‑level negative log‑likelihood over semantically equivalent sequences for more reliable cross‑lingual comparisons.

By Xiulin Yang, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Catherine Arnett
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Evaluating the Evaluator: Summarization Metrics and LLM-Judges beyond English

The paper introduces BASSE, a multilingual meta‑evaluation dataset containing 2,040 human‑rated abstractive summaries produced manually or by five LLMs with four prompts. Annotators scored each summary on coherence, consistency, fluency, relevance, and 5W1H using a 5‑point Likert scale. Benchmarking shows proprietary LLM‑judge models best align with human judgments, followed by criteria‑specific automatic metrics, while open‑source judge LLMs perform poorly.

By Jeremy Barnes, Naiara Perez, Alba Bonet-Jover, Bego\~na Altuna