# Exploring the Use of Large Language Models for Reference-Free Text Quality Evaluation: An Empirical Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00723 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00723/

## Key facts

- Cited by 85 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11520/) (2021)
- [SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12626/) (2020)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good NLG Evaluator? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04048/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Are State-of-the-Art Evaluators of Translation Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14520/) (2023)
- [MoverScore: Text Generation Evaluating with Contextualized Embeddings and Earth Mover Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02622/) (2019)
- [GPTScore: Evaluate as You Desire](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04166/) (2023)
- [USR: An Unsupervised and Reference Free Evaluation Metric for Dialog Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00456/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Evaluation of Interactive Dialog with DialoGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12719/) (2020)
- [Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation in Many Languages via Zero-Shot Paraphrasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14564/) (2020)
- [OpenMEVA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Open-ended Story Generation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08920/) (2021)
- [DynaEval: Unifying Turn and Dialogue Level Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01112/) (2021)
- [Better Automatic Evaluation of Open-Domain Dialogue Systems with Contextualized Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10635/) (2019)
- [On the Evaluation Metrics for Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08479/) (2022)
- [Exploring ChatGPT's Ability to Rank Content: A Preliminary Study on Consistency with Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07610/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT A Good Keyphrase Generator? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13001/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Paraphrasing with Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12885/) (2020)
- [SelF-Eval: Self-supervised Fine-grained Dialogue Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08094/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 85)

- [From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16594/) (2024)
- [LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18403/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19736/) (2023)
- [Aligning with Human Judgement: The Role of Pairwise Preference in Large Language Model Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16950/) (2024)
- [Is LLM-as-a-Judge Robust? Investigating Universal Adversarial Attacks on Zero-shot LLM Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14016/) (2024)
- [Jatmo: Prompt Injection Defense by Task-Specific Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17673/) (2023)
- [On Learning to Summarize with Large Language Models as References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14239/) (2023)
- [Systematic Evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge in LLM Alignment Tasks: Explainable Metrics and Diverse Prompt Templates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13006/) (2024)
- [Mark My Words: Analyzing and Evaluating Language Model Watermarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00273/) (2023)
- [Corex: Pushing the Boundaries of Complex Reasoning through Multi-Model Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00280/) (2023)
- [An Emulator for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models using Small Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12962/) (2023)
- [Evaluating LLMs at Detecting Errors in LLM Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03602/) (2024)
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- [Aligning Large Language Models with Human: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12966/) (2023)
- [Interactive Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13246/) (2023)
- [Data-Centric Foundation Models in Computational Healthcare: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02458/) (2024)
- [The Scales of Justitia: A Comprehensive Survey on Safety Evaluation of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11094/) (2025)
- [Fairer Preferences Elicit Improved Human-Aligned Large Language Model Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11370/) (2024)
- [TRUCE: Private Benchmarking to Prevent Contamination and Improve Comparative Evaluation of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00393/) (2024)
- [Deconstructing The Ethics of Large Language Models from Long-standing Issues to New-emerging Dilemmas: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05392/) (2024)
- [RevisEval: Improving LLM-as-a-Judge via Response-Adapted References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05193/) (2024)
- [CoheMark: A Novel Sentence-Level Watermark for Enhanced Text Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17309/) (2025)
- [The Energy Loss Phenomenon in RLHF: A New Perspective on Mitigating Reward Hacking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19358/) (2025)
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- [Language Models as Science Tutors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11111/) (2024)
- [What Makes a Good Story and How Can We Measure It? A Comprehensive Survey of Story Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14622/) (2024)
- [One Prompt To Rule Them All: LLMs for Opinion Summary Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11683/) (2024)
- [Towards Explainable Evaluation Metrics for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13041/) (2023)
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## Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluating the quality of generated text is a challenging task in NLP, due to the inherent complexity and diversity of text. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their impressive performance in various tasks. Therefore, we present this paper to investigate the effectiveness of LLMs, especially ChatGPT, and explore ways to optimize their use in assessing text quality. We compared three kinds of reference-free evaluation methods. The experimental results prove that ChatGPT is capable of evaluating text quality effectively from various perspectives without reference and demonstrates superior performance than most existing automatic metrics. In particular, the Explicit Score, which utilizes ChatGPT to generate a numeric score measuring text quality, is the most effective and reliable method among the three exploited approaches. However, directly comparing the quality of two texts may lead to suboptimal results. We believe this paper will provide valuable insights for evaluating text quality with LLMs and have released the used data.