Question: How does ROUGE evaluate system-generated summaries?
Evidence: Automatic text summarization has been an active research area in natural language processing for several decades. To compare and evaluate the performance of different summarization systems, the most intuitive approach is assessing the quality of the summaries by human evaluators. However, manual evaluation is expensive and the obtained results are subjective and difficult to reproduce BIBREF0 . To address these problems, automatic evaluation measures for summarization have been proposed. Rouge BIBREF1 is one of the first and most widely used metrics in summarization evaluation. It facilitates evaluation of system generated summaries by comparing them to a set of human written gold-standard summaries. It is inspired by the success of a similar metric Bleu BIBREF2 which is being used in Machine Translation (MT) evaluation. The main success of Rouge is due to its high correlation with human assessment scores on standard benchmarks BIBREF1 . Rouge has been used as one of the main evaluation metrics in later summarization benchmarks such as TAC[1] BIBREF3 .
[1]Text Analysis Conference (TAC) is a series of workshops for evaluating research in Natural Language Processing
Since the establishment of Rouge, almost all research in text summarization have used this metric as the main means for evaluating the quality of the proposed approaches. The public availability of Rouge as a toolkit for summarization evaluation has contributed to its wide usage. While Rouge has originally shown good correlations with human assessments, the study of its effectiveness was only limited to a few benchmarks on news summarization data (DUC[2] 2001-2003 benchmarks). Since 2003, summarization has grown to much further domains and genres such as scientific documents, social media and question answering. While there is not enough compelling evidence about the effectiveness of Rouge on these other summarization tasks, published research is almost always evaluated by Rouge. In addition, Rouge has a large number of possible variants and the published research often (arbitrarily) reports only a few of these variants.
[2]Document Understanding Conference (DUC) was one of NIST workshops that provided infrastructure for evaluation of text summarization methodologies (http://duc.nist.gov/).
By definition, Rouge solely relies on lexical overlaps (such as n-gram and sequence overlaps) between the system generated and human written gold-standard summaries. Higher lexical overlaps between the two show that the system generated summary is of higher quality. Therefore, in cases of terminology nuances and paraphrasing, Rouge is not accurate in estimating the quality of the summary.
We study the effectiveness of Rouge for evaluating scientific summarization. Scientific summarization targets much more technical and focused domains in which the goal is providing summaries for scientific articles. Scientific articles are much different than news articles in elements such as length, complexity and structure. Thus, effective summarization approaches usually have much higher compression rate, terminology variations and paraphrasing BIBREF4 .
Scientific summarization has attracted more attention recently (examples include works by abu2011coherent, qazvinian2013generating, and cohan2015scientific). Thus, it is important to study the validity of existing methodologies applied to the evaluation of news article summarization for this task. In particular, we raise the important question of how effective is Rouge, as an evaluation metric for scientific summarization? We answer this question by comparing Rouge scores with semi-manual evaluation score (Pyramid) in TAC 2014 scientific summarization dataset[1]. Results reveal that, contrary to the common belief, correlations between Rouge and the Pyramid scores are weak, which challenges its effectiveness for scientific summarization. Furthermore, we show a large variance of correlations between different Rouge variants and the manual evaluations which further makes the reliability of Rouge for evaluating scientific summaries less clear. We then propose an evaluation metric based on relevance analysis of summaries which aims to overcome the limitation of high lexical dependence in Rouge. We call our metric Sera (Summarization Evaluation by Relevance Analysis). Results show that the proposed metric achieves higher and more consistent correlations with semi-manual assessment scores.
[1]http://www.nist.gov/tac/2014/BiomedSumm/
Our contributions are as follows:
[2]The annotations can be accessed via the following repository: https://github.com/acohan/TAC-pyramid-Annotations/
ROUGE (Lin, 2004) is one of the first and most widely used metrics in summarization evaluation. It facilitates evaluation of system generated summaries by comparing them to a set of human written gold-standard summaries. It is inspired by the success of a similar metric BLEU (Papineni et al., 2002) which is being used in Machine Translation (MT) evaluation.
Answer: By comparing them to a set of human written gold-standard summaries.