# Transparent Reference-free Automated Evaluation of Open-Ended User Survey Responses

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06242 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06242/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01937/) (2023)
- [BLEU might be Guilty but References are not Innocent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06063/) (2020)
- [Are LLM-based Evaluators Confusing NLG Quality Criteria?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12055/) (2024)
- [HD-Eval: Aligning Large Language Model Evaluators Through Hierarchical Criteria Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15754/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Uncertainty Quantification Evaluation in Language Models: Spurious Interactions with Response Length Bias Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13677/) (2025)
- [Reference-free Evaluation Metrics for Text Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12011/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-ended survey responses provide valuable insights in marketing research, but low-quality responses not only burden researchers with manual filtering but also risk leading to misleading conclusions, underscoring the need for effective evaluation. Existing automatic evaluation methods target LLM-generated text and inadequately assess human-written responses with their distinct characteristics. To address such characteristics, we propose a two-stage evaluation framework specifically designed for human survey responses. First, gibberish filtering removes nonsensical responses. Then, three dimensions-effort, relevance, and completeness-are evaluated using LLM capabilities, grounded in empirical analysis of real-world survey data. Validation on English and Korean datasets shows that our framework not only outperforms existing metrics but also demonstrates high practical applicability for real-world applications such as response quality prediction and response rejection, showing strong correlations with expert assessment.