{"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/beametrics-a-benchmark-for-language","title":"BEAMetrics: A Benchmark for Language Generation Evaluation Evaluation","arxiv_id":"2110.09147","date":"2021-10-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Thomas Scialom","Felix Hill"],"abstract":"Natural language processing (NLP) systems are increasingly trained to generate open-ended text rather than classifying between responses. This makes research on evaluation metrics for generated language -- functions that score system output given the context and/or human reference responses -- of critical importance. However, different metrics have different strengths and biases, and reflect human intuitions better on some tasks than others. There is currently no simple, unified way to compare, analyse or evaluate metrics across a representative set of tasks. Here, we describe the Benchmark to Evaluate Automatic Metrics (BEAMetrics), a resource to make research into new metrics itself easier to evaluate. BEAMetrics users can quickly compare existing and new metrics with human judgements across a diverse set of tasks, quality dimensions (fluency vs. coherence vs. informativeness etc), and languages. As generation experts might predict, BEAMetrics reveals stark task-dependent differences between existing metrics, and consistently poor performance on tasks with complex answer spaces or high reliance on general knowledge. While this analysis highlights a critical issue facing current research practice, BEAMetrics also contribute to its resolution by facilitating research into better metrics -- particularly those that can account for the complex interaction between context and general knowledge inherent to many modern NLP applications. BEAMetrics is available under the MIT License: https://github.com/ThomasScialom/BEAMetrics","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09147v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.09147v1.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":"beametrics-a-benchmark-for-language","repo_url":"https://github.com/thomasscialom/beametrics","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"beametrics-a-benchmark-for-language","repo_url":"https://github.com/moussakam/frugalscore","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"general-knowledge","task_name":"General Knowledge"},{"task_slug":"informativeness","task_name":"Informativeness"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"beametrics","name":"BEAMetrics","full_name":""}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2110.09147","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}