{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/automatic-metrics-in-natural-language","title":"Automatic Metrics in Natural Language Generation: A Survey of Current Evaluation Practices","arxiv_id":"2408.09169","date":"2024-08-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Patrícia Schmidtová","Saad Mahamood","Simone Balloccu","Ondřej Dušek","Albert Gatt","Dimitra Gkatzia","David M. Howcroft","Ondřej Plátek","Adarsa Sivaprasad"],"abstract":"Automatic metrics are extensively used to evaluate natural language processing systems. However, there has been increasing focus on how they are used and reported by practitioners within the field. In this paper, we have conducted a survey on the use of automatic metrics, focusing particularly on natural language generation (NLG) tasks. We inspect which metrics are used as well as why they are chosen and how their use is reported. Our findings from this survey reveal significant shortcomings, including inappropriate metric usage, lack of implementation details and missing correlations with human judgements. We conclude with recommendations that we believe authors should follow to enable more rigour within the field.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09169v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.09169v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"automatic-metrics-in-natural-language","repo_url":"https://github.com/patuchen/nlg_metric_usage","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"survey","task_name":"Survey"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2408.09169","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}