# Evaluation of Text Generation: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.14799 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14799/

## Key facts

- Cited by 277 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 277)

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- ["I'm sorry to hear that": Finding New Biases in Language Models with a Holistic Descriptor Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09209/) (2022)
- [Repairing the Cracked Foundation: A Survey of Obstacles in Evaluation Practices for Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06935/) (2022)
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- [WebGLM: Towards An Efficient Web-Enhanced Question Answering System with Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07906/) (2023)
- [The Perils of Using Mechanical Turk to Evaluate Open-Ended Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06835/) (2021)
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- [Is GPT-3 Text Indistinguishable from Human Text? Scarecrow: A Framework for Scrutinizing Machine Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01294/) (2021)
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- [Language Model Self-improvement by Reinforcement Learning Contemplation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14483/) (2023)
- [LLM-based NLG Evaluation: Current Status and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01383/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The paper surveys evaluation methods of natural language generation (NLG) systems that have been developed in the last few years. We group NLG evaluation methods into three categories: (1) human-centric evaluation metrics, (2) automatic metrics that require no training, and (3) machine-learned metrics. For each category, we discuss the progress that has been made and the challenges still being faced, with a focus on the evaluation of recently proposed NLG tasks and neural NLG models. We then present two examples for task-specific NLG evaluations for automatic text summarization and long text generation, and conclude the paper by proposing future research directions.
