English

MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers

Computation and Language 2021-11-24 v3

Abstract

As major progress is made in open-ended text generation, measuring how close machine-generated text is to human language remains a critical open problem. We introduce MAUVE, a comparison measure for open-ended text generation, which directly compares the learnt distribution from a text generation model to the distribution of human-written text using divergence frontiers. MAUVE scales up to modern text generation models by computing information divergences in a quantized embedding space. Through an extensive empirical study on three open-ended generation tasks, we find that MAUVE identifies known properties of generated text, scales naturally with model size, and correlates with human judgments, with fewer restrictions than existing distributional evaluation metrics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.01454,
  title  = {MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers},
  author = {Krishna Pillutla and Swabha Swayamdipta and Rowan Zellers and John Thickstun and Sean Welleck and Yejin Choi and Zaid Harchaoui},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.01454},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

NeurIPS 2021 (Oral Presentation). Package: https://github.com/krishnap25/mauve

R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:45:42.345Z