Better Summarization Evaluation with Word Embeddings for ROUGE
This work addresses the need for more accurate evaluation metrics in abstractive summarization, though it is incremental as it builds on existing ROUGE methods.
The authors tackled the problem of ROUGE's bias towards lexical similarity in summarization evaluation by using word embeddings to measure semantic similarity, achieving better correlations with human judgments as shown by improved Spearman and Kendall rank coefficients.
ROUGE is a widely adopted, automatic evaluation measure for text summarization. While it has been shown to correlate well with human judgements, it is biased towards surface lexical similarities. This makes it unsuitable for the evaluation of abstractive summarization, or summaries with substantial paraphrasing. We study the effectiveness of word embeddings to overcome this disadvantage of ROUGE. Specifically, instead of measuring lexical overlaps, word embeddings are used to compute the semantic similarity of the words used in summaries instead. Our experimental results show that our proposal is able to achieve better correlations with human judgements when measured with the Spearman and Kendall rank coefficients.