{"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/mqag-multiple-choice-question-answering-and","title":"MQAG: Multiple-choice Question Answering and Generation for Assessing Information Consistency in Summarization","arxiv_id":"2301.12307","date":"2023-01-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Potsawee Manakul","Adian Liusie","Mark J. F. Gales"],"abstract":"State-of-the-art summarization systems can generate highly fluent summaries. These summaries, however, may contain factual inconsistencies and/or information not present in the source. Hence, an important component of assessing the quality of summaries is to determine whether there is information consistency between the source and the summary. Existing approaches are typically based on lexical matching or representation-based methods. In this work, we introduce an alternative scheme based on standard information-theoretic measures in which the information present in the source and summary is directly compared. We propose a Multiple-choice Question Answering and Generation framework, MQAG, which approximates the information consistency by computing the expected statistical distance between summary and source answer distributions over automatically generated multiple-choice questions. This approach exploits multiple-choice answer probabilities, as predicted answer distributions can be compared. We conduct experiments on four summary evaluation datasets: QAG-CNNDM/XSum, XSum-Hallucination, Podcast Assessment, and SummEval. Experiments show that MQAG, using models trained on SQuAD or RACE, outperforms existing evaluation methods on the majority of tasks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12307v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.12307v2.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":"mqag-multiple-choice-question-answering-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/potsawee/mqag0","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"mqag-multiple-choice-question-answering-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/potsawee/selfcheckgpt","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"hallucination","task_name":"Hallucination"},{"task_slug":"multiple-choice","task_name":"Multiple-choice"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2301.12307","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2301.12307"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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