English

Does Summary Evaluation Survive Translation to Other Languages?

Computation and Language 2021-12-09 v2

Abstract

The creation of a quality summarization dataset is an expensive, time-consuming effort, requiring the production and evaluation of summaries by both trained humans and machines. If such effort is made in one language, it would be beneficial to be able to use it in other languages without repeating human annotations. To investigate how much we can trust machine translation of such a dataset, we translate the English dataset SummEval to seven languages and compare performance across automatic evaluation measures. We explore equivalence testing as the appropriate statistical paradigm for evaluating correlations between human and automated scoring of summaries. While we find some potential for dataset reuse in languages similar to the source, most summary evaluation methods are not found to be statistically equivalent across translations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.08129,
  title  = {Does Summary Evaluation Survive Translation to Other Languages?},
  author = {Spencer Braun and Oleg Vasilyev and Neslihan Iskender and John Bohannon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.08129},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

9 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, 3 appendixes

R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:02:49.833Z