Automatic Evaluation of Text Coherence: Models and Representations

Mirella Lapata, Regina Barzilay

Abstract: This paper investigates the automatic evaluation of text coherence for machine-generated texts. We introduce a fully-automatic, linguistically rich model of local coherence that correlates with human judgments. Our modeling approach relies on shallow text properties and is relatively inexpensive. We present experimental results that assess the predictive power of various discourse representations proposed in the linguistic literature. Our results demonstrate that certain models capture complementary aspects of coherence and thus can be combined to improve performance.