English

MENLI: Robust Evaluation Metrics from Natural Language Inference

Computation and Language 2023-12-27 v5 Cryptography and Security Machine Learning

Abstract

Recently proposed BERT-based evaluation metrics for text generation perform well on standard benchmarks but are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, e.g., relating to information correctness. We argue that this stems (in part) from the fact that they are models of semantic similarity. In contrast, we develop evaluation metrics based on Natural Language Inference (NLI), which we deem a more appropriate modeling. We design a preference-based adversarial attack framework and show that our NLI based metrics are much more robust to the attacks than the recent BERT-based metrics. On standard benchmarks, our NLI based metrics outperform existing summarization metrics, but perform below SOTA MT metrics. However, when combining existing metrics with our NLI metrics, we obtain both higher adversarial robustness (15%-30%) and higher quality metrics as measured on standard benchmarks (+5% to 30%).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2208.07316,
  title  = {MENLI: Robust Evaluation Metrics from Natural Language Inference},
  author = {Yanran Chen and Steffen Eger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.07316},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

TACL 2023 Camera-ready version; updated after proofreading by the journal

R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:43:11.936Z