Papers › Referenceless Quality Estimation for Natural Language Generation

Referenceless Quality Estimation for Natural Language Generation

5 Aug 2017arXiv:1708.01759archive 2025-07-28

Ondřej Dušek, Jekaterina Novikova, Verena Rieser

Traditional automatic evaluation measures for natural language generation (NLG) use costly human-authored references to estimate the quality of a system output. In this paper, we propose a referenceless quality estimation (QE) approach based on recurrent neural networks, which predicts a quality score for a NLG system output by comparing it to the source meaning representation only. Our method outperforms traditional metrics and a constant baseline in most respects; we also show that synthetic data helps to increase correlation results by 21% compared to the base system. Our results are comparable to results obtained in similar QE tasks despite the more challenging setting.

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