How to properly conduct human evaluations for text summarization is a longstanding challenge. The Pyramid human evaluation protocol, which assesses content selection by breaking the reference summary into subunits and verifying their presence in the system summary, has been widely adopted. However, it suffers from a lack of systematicity in the definition and granularity of the sub-units. We address these problems by proposing QAPyramid, which decomposes each reference summary into finer-grained question-answer (QA) pairs according to the QA-SRL framework. We collect QA-SRL annotations for reference summaries from CNN/DM and evaluate 10 summarization systems, resulting in 8.9K QA-level annotations. We show that, compared to Pyramid, QAPyramid provides more systematic and fine-grained content selection evaluation while maintaining high inter-annotator agreement without needing expert annotations. Furthermore, we propose metrics that automate the evaluation pipeline and achieve higher correlations with QAPyramid than other widely adopted metrics.
@article{arxiv.2412.07096,
title = {QAPyramid: Fine-grained Evaluation of Content Selection for Text Summarization},
author = {Shiyue Zhang and David Wan and Arie Cattan and Ayal Klein and Ido Dagan and Mohit Bansal},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.07096},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted to COLM 2025. The first two authors contributed equally. Code: https://github.com/ZhangShiyue/QAPyramid