Papers › Better Summarization Evaluation with Word Embeddings for ROUGE

Better Summarization Evaluation with Word Embeddings for ROUGE

25 Aug 2015EMNLP 2015 9arXiv:1508.06034archive 2025-07-28

Jun-Ping Ng, Viktoria Abrecht

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.

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ng-j-p/rouge-we officialmentioned in paperMIT report

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Abstractive Text SummarizationSemantic SimilaritySemantic Textual SimilarityText SummarizationWord Embeddings

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