{"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/near-negative-distinction-giving-a-second","title":"Near-Negative Distinction: Giving a Second Life to Human Evaluation Datasets","arxiv_id":"2205.06871","date":"2022-05-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Philippe Laban","Chien-Sheng Wu","Wenhao Liu","Caiming Xiong"],"abstract":"Precisely assessing the progress in natural language generation (NLG) tasks is challenging, and human evaluation to establish a preference in a model's output over another is often necessary. However, human evaluation is usually costly, difficult to reproduce, and non-reusable. In this paper, we propose a new and simple automatic evaluation method for NLG called Near-Negative Distinction (NND) that repurposes prior human annotations into NND tests. In an NND test, an NLG model must place a higher likelihood on a high-quality output candidate than on a near-negative candidate with a known error. Model performance is established by the number of NND tests a model passes, as well as the distribution over task-specific errors the model fails on. Through experiments on three NLG tasks (question generation, question answering, and summarization), we show that NND achieves a higher correlation with human judgments than standard NLG evaluation metrics. We then illustrate NND evaluation in four practical scenarios, for example performing fine-grain model analysis, or studying model training dynamics. Our findings suggest that NND can give a second life to human annotations and provide low-cost NLG evaluation.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06871v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.06871v2.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":"near-negative-distinction-giving-a-second","repo_url":"https://github.com/salesforce/nnd_evaluation","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"question-generation","task_name":"Question Generation"},{"task_slug":"question-generation","task_name":"Question-Generation"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"},{"task_slug":"nlg-evaluation","task_name":"nlg evaluation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2205.06871","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}