COSMIC: Mutual Information for Task-Agnostic Summarization Evaluation

Kernkonzepte

The author proposes COSMIC as a task-oriented evaluation metric based on mutual information between source texts and summaries. It correlates well with human judgment-based metrics and predicts downstream task performance effectively.

Zusammenfassung

The content introduces COSMIC, a novel evaluation metric for summarizers based on mutual information. It addresses challenges in assessing summarizer quality and demonstrates strong correlations with human judgment-based metrics. The approach is theoretically grounded and offers insights into the effectiveness of summaries for downstream tasks.
Standard automatic evaluation methods like BLEU and ROUGE often do not align well with human judgments. Recent efforts focus on learned metrics to score summaries accurately. The proposed method evaluates the probability distribution of summaries induced by summarizers, emphasizing task-oriented evaluation setups.
The study introduces two modifications to the conventional paradigm of evaluating individual output summaries. It proposes evaluating the probability distribution of summaries induced by summarizers and adopts a task-oriented evaluation setup where summaries enable agents to perform downstream tasks without reading the source text.
The research establishes an information-theoretic rationale for a metric that involves assessing mutual information between source texts and generated summaries. The quality assessment framework is framed as a statistical inference problem, deriving a reference-free quality metric based on mutual information.
Contributions include framing summarizer evaluation as a statistical inference problem, proposing COSMIC as a practical implementation, and experimentally evaluating MI's predictive performance compared to conventional metrics like BERTScore and BARTScore.

Statistiken

We introduce COSMIC as a practical implementation of this metric.
Comparative analyses highlight the competitive performance of COSMIC.
Our findings demonstrate that MI is competitive with other metrics.
The lower bound holds for an arbitrary loss measuring disagreement between concepts.
The MI estimator relies on Gaussian Mixtures with K modes.
Embeddings are obtained from source texts and summaries using different models.
Models trained on Arxiv or medical data perform poorly in terms of MI.
OOD models display significantly lower MI compared to IN distribution models like BART.
The size of the model does not significantly impact MI estimation accuracy.

Zitate

"Assessing the quality of summarizers poses significant challenges."
"We propose a novel task-oriented evaluation approach based on mutual information."
"COSMIC demonstrates strong correlation with human judgment-based metrics."

Wichtige Erkenntnisse aus

$\texttt{COSMIC}$

by Maxime Darri... um arxiv.org 03-01-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.19457.pdf

Tiefere Fragen

How can we ensure that our evaluation metrics capture all aspects of summary quality beyond just informativeness?

To ensure that our evaluation metrics capture all aspects of summary quality beyond just informativeness, we need to consider a multi-faceted approach. Here are some strategies:

Incorporate Multiple Metrics: Instead of relying solely on one metric like COSMIC for evaluating summarization systems, it is essential to use a combination of metrics that cover various aspects of summary quality. This could include metrics for fluency, coherence, relevance, grammaticality, and overall readability.

Human Evaluation: Human judgment is crucial in assessing the quality of summaries comprehensively. Conducting human evaluations where individuals assess summaries based on different criteria can provide valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of a summarization system.

Diverse Dataset Selection: Using diverse datasets with varying topics, styles, and complexities can help in capturing different dimensions of summary quality. Evaluating systems across multiple datasets ensures robustness and generalizability.

Task-Specific Evaluation: Tailoring evaluation metrics to specific tasks or domains can help in capturing task-specific requirements for summary quality. For example, summaries intended for educational purposes may require different evaluation criteria compared to those meant for news articles.

Continuous Improvement: Regularly updating and refining evaluation metrics based on feedback from users and researchers can enhance their effectiveness in capturing all aspects of summary quality over time.

How might incorporating user feedback or preferences impact the effectiveness of metrics like COSMIC in evaluating summarization systems?

Incorporating user feedback or preferences can have several implications for the effectiveness of metrics like COSMIC in evaluating summarization systems:

Enhanced Relevance: User feedback provides direct insights into what users find relevant or valuable in summaries. By incorporating this feedback into the evaluation process, metrics like COSMIC can be adjusted to prioritize aspects that align with user preferences.

Improved Customization: User preferences vary widely based on individual needs and contexts. By considering user feedback, evaluative metrics can be customized to reflect these diverse preferences more accurately.

Validation against Real-World Utility: User feedback often reflects real-world utility – how well a summary serves its intended purpose or aids decision-making processes effectively.

4 .Bias Mitigation: Incorporating user feedback helps identify biases inherent in automated metric design by providing a human-centered perspective on what constitutes high-quality summaries.
5 .Iterative Development: Continuous integration
allows iterative refinement based on ongoing
input from end-users which enhances the adaptability
& efficacy .

What are potential ethical considerations when using automated metrics like COSMIC to evaluate text generation systems?

When using automated metrics such as COSMIC to evaluate text generation systems,
several ethical considerations should be taken into account:

Fairness: Ensure that the metric does not introduce bias towards certain demographics,
topics or writing styles which could lead to unfair advantages/disadvantages

Transparency: Provide clear explanations about how the metric works so that users understand
how their work is being evaluated

Privacy: Protect sensitive information contained within texts used during evaluations
and prevent unauthorized access

Accountability: Establish mechanisms through which responsible parties
can be held accountable if issues arise due
to inaccuracies/biases introduced by the metric

Informed Consent: Obtain consent from participants whose data will be used
for training/evaluation purposes

Data Security : Implement measures ensuring secure storage & handling
of data utilized during evaluations