# LLM-as-a-qualitative-judge: automating error analysis in natural language generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09147 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09147/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [Prometheus: Inducing Fine-grained Evaluation Capability in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08491/) (2023)
- [ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01488/) (2021)
- [Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01535/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Are State-of-the-Art Evaluators of Translation Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14520/) (2023)
- [Experts, Errors, and Context: A Large-Scale Study of Human Evaluation for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14478/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models at Evaluating Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07641/) (2023)
- [xCOMET: Transparent Machine Translation Evaluation through Fine-grained Error Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10482/) (2023)
- [LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18403/) (2024)
- [SearchQA: A New Q&A Dataset Augmented with Context from a Search Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05179/) (2017)
- [FLASK: Fine-grained Language Model Evaluation based on Alignment Skill Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10928/) (2023)
- [SOLAR 10.7B: Scaling Large Language Models with Simple yet Effective Depth Up-Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15166/) (2023)
- [MKQA: A Linguistically Diverse Benchmark for Multilingual Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15207/) (2020)
- [CommonsenseQA 2.0: Exposing the Limits of AI through Gamification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05320/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Enable Few-Shot Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00524/) (2023)
- [ClusterLLM: Large Language Models as a Guide for Text Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14871/) (2023)
- [TIGERScore: Towards Building Explainable Metric for All Text Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00752/) (2023)
- [TICKing All the Boxes: Generated Checklists Improve LLM Evaluation and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03608/) (2024)
- [RAG-QA Arena: Evaluating Domain Robustness for Long-form Retrieval Augmented Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13998/) (2024)
- [SEAHORSE: A Multilingual, Multifaceted Dataset for Summarization Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13194/) (2023)
- [M-Prometheus: A Suite of Open Multilingual LLM Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04953/) (2025)
- [Underreporting of errors in NLG output, and what to do about it](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01182/) (2021)
- [Text Clustering as Classification with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00927/) (2024)
- [METAL: Towards Multilingual Meta-Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01667/) (2024)

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

- [The Yes-Man Syndrome: Benchmarking Abstention in Embodied Robotic Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20544/) (2026)
- [PROMPT2BOX:Improving LLM Weakness Discovery and Specificity Estimation by Uncovering Entailment Structure among Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21438/) (2026)
- [Agents Are Systems, Not Models: Rethinking Agentic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01618/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prompting large language models (LLMs) to evaluate generated text, known as LLM-as-a-judge, has become a standard evaluation approach in natural language generation (NLG), but is primarily used as a quantitative tool, i.e. with numerical scores as main outputs. In this work, we propose LLM-as-a-qualitative-judge, an LLM-based evaluation approach with the main output being a structured report of common issue types in the NLG system outputs. Our approach is targeted at providing developers with meaningful insights on what improvements can be done to a given NLG system and consists of two main steps, namely open-ended per-instance issue analysis and clustering of the discovered issues using an intuitive cumulative algorithm. We also introduce a strategy for evaluating the proposed approach, coupled with ~300 annotations of issues in instances from 12 NLG datasets. Our results show that instance-specific issues output by LLM-as-a-qualitative-judge match those annotated by humans in 2/3 cases, and that LLM-as-a-qualitative-judge is capable of producing error type reports resembling the reports composed by human annotators. We also demonstrate in a case study how the use of LLM-as-a-qualitative-judge can substantially improve NLG systems performance. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/tunde-ajayi/llm-as-a-qualitative-judge.