SMURF: Semantic and linguistic understanding fusion for caption evaluation via typicality analysis

Joshua Feinglass, Yezhou Yang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

The open-ended nature of visual captioning makes it a challenging area for evaluation. The majority of proposed models rely on specialized training to improve human-correlation, resulting in limited adoption, generalizability, and explainabilty. We introduce “typicality”, a new formulation of evaluation rooted in information theory, which is uniquely suited for problems lacking a definite ground truth. Typicality serves as our framework to develop a novel semantic comparison, SPARCS, as well as referenceless fluency evaluation metrics. Over the course of our analysis, two separate dimensions of fluency naturally emerge: style, captured by metric SPURTS, and grammar, captured in the form of grammatical outlier penalties. Through extensive experiments and ablation studies on benchmark datasets, we show how these decomposed dimensions of semantics and fluency provide greater system-level insight into captioner differences. Our proposed metrics along with their combination, SMURF, achieve state-of-the-art correlation with human judgment when compared with other rule-based evaluation metrics.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationACL-IJCNLP 2021 - 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages2250-2260
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085527
StatePublished - 2021
EventJoint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, ACL-IJCNLP 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Aug 1 2021Aug 6 2021

Publication series

NameACL-IJCNLP 2021 - 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

ConferenceJoint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, ACL-IJCNLP 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period8/1/218/6/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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