# Language Model Evaluation in Open-ended Text Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03578 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03578/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08593/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [Attention is not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10186/) (2019)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04319/) (2019)
- [Texygen: A Benchmarking Platform for Text Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01886/) (2018)
- [A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01696/) (2016)
- [A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00685/) (2015)
- [Fine-Tuning Pretrained Language Models: Weight Initializations, Data Orders, and Early Stopping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06305/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Don't Take This Out of Context! On the Need for Contextual Models and Evaluations for Stylistic Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14755/) (2023)
- [Injecting knowledge into language generation: a case study in auto-charting after-visit care instructions from medical dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03652/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although current state-of-the-art language models have achieved impressive results in numerous natural language processing tasks, still they could not solve the problem of producing repetitive, dull and sometimes inconsistent text in open-ended text generation. Studies often attribute this problem to the maximum likelihood training objective, and propose alternative approaches by using stochastic decoding methods or altering the training objective. However, there is still a lack of consistent evaluation metrics to directly compare the efficacy of these solutions. In this work, we study different evaluation metrics that have been proposed to evaluate quality, diversity and consistency of machine-generated text. From there, we propose a practical pipeline to evaluate language models in open-ended generation task, and research on how to improve the model's performance in all dimensions by leveraging different auxiliary training objectives.