arXiv AI By Kawin Ethayarajh, Dan Jurafsky

The Authenticity Gap in Human Evaluation

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The paper critiques the conventional method of averaging human ratings to evaluate natural language generation (NLG) systems, arguing that it relies on assumptions about annotators that are often violated, especially when using Likert scales. These violations can even reverse true preferences, leading to inaccurate system rankings. The authors propose a more theoretically sound protocol and introduce a new system-level probabilistic assessment (SPA) for open-ended tasks like story generation, which successfully recovers expected model orderings where the standard protocol fails.

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