# How Much Annotation is Needed to Compare Summarization Models?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18756 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18756/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [SummaC: Re-Visiting NLI-based Models for Inconsistency Detection in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09525/) (2021)
- [Newsroom: A Dataset of 1.3 Million Summaries with Diverse Extractive Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11283/) (2018)
- [Towards a Unified Multi-Dimensional Evaluator for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07197/) (2022)
- [QAFactEval: Improved QA-Based Factual Consistency Evaluation for Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08542/) (2021)
- [Repairing the Cracked Foundation: A Survey of Obstacles in Evaluation Practices for Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06935/) (2022)
- [With Little Power Comes Great Responsibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06595/) (2020)
- [Revisiting the Gold Standard: Grounding Summarization Evaluation with Robust Human Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07981/) (2022)
- [RankME: Reliable Human Ratings for Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05928/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Towards Aligning Language Models with Textual Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16970/) (2024)
- [A Critical Look at Meta-evaluating Summarisation Evaluation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19507/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Digitized Newspapers to Collect Summarization Data in Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14598/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern instruction-tuned models have become highly capable in text generation tasks such as summarization, and are expected to be released at a steady pace. In practice one may now wish to choose confidently, but with minimal effort, the best performing summarization model when applied to a new domain or purpose. In this work, we empirically investigate the test sample size necessary to select a preferred model in the context of news summarization. Empirical results reveal that comparative evaluation converges quickly for both automatic and human evaluation, with clear preferences for a system emerging from under 100 examples. The human preference data allows us to quantify how well automatic scores can reproduce preference rankings across a variety of downstream summarization tasks. We find that, while automatic metrics are stable at smaller sample sizes, only some automatic metrics are able to moderately predict model win rates according to human preference.