BLEU is not suitable for the evaluation of text simplification

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

BLEU is widely considered to be an informative metric for text-to-text generation, including Text Simplification (TS). TS includes both lexical and structural aspects. In this paper we show that BLEU is not suitable for the evaluation of sentence splitting, the major structural simplification operation. We manually compiled a sentence splitting gold standard corpus containing multiple structural paraphrases, and performed a correlation analysis with human judgments.1 We find low or no correlation between BLEU and the grammaticality and meaning preservation parameters where sentence splitting is involved. Moreover, BLEU often negatively correlates with simplicity, essentially penalizing simpler sentences.

Original languageAmerican English
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018
EditorsEllen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun'ichi Tsujii
Pages738-744
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781948087841
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2018
Event2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018 - Brussels, Belgium
Duration: 31 Oct 20184 Nov 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018

Conference

Conference2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018
Country/TerritoryBelgium
CityBrussels
Period31/10/184/11/18

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'BLEU is not suitable for the evaluation of text simplification'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this