CALF: Benchmarking Evaluation of LFQA Using Chinese Examinations

Yuchen Fan, Xin Zhong, Heng Zhou, Yuchen Zhang, Mingyu Liang, Chengxing Xie, Ermo Hua, Ning Ding, Bowen Zhou

Keywords: Benchmark, Evaluation, Long-form QA, Large Language Models

TL;DR: A benchmark for the evaluation of LFQA

Abstract: Long-Form Question Answering (LFQA) refers to generating in-depth,paragraph-level responses to open-ended questions. Although lots of LFQA methods are developed, evaluating LFQA effectively and efficiently remains challenging due to its high complexity and cost. Therefore, there is no standard benchmark for LFQA evaluation till now. To address this gap, we make the first attempt by proposing a well-constructed, reference-based benchmark named Chinese exAmination for LFQA Evaluation (CALF), aiming to rigorously assess the performance of automatic evaluation metrics for LFQA. The CALF benchmark is derived from Chinese examination questions that have been translated into English. It includes up to 1476 examples consisting of knowledge-intensive and nuanced responses. Our evaluation comprises three different settings to analyze the behavior of automatic metrics comprehensively. We conducted extensive experiments on 7 traditional evaluation metrics, 3 prompt-based metrics, and 3 trained evaluation metrics, and tested on agent systems for the LFQA evaluation. The results reveal that none of the current automatic evaluation metrics shows comparable performances with humans, indicating that they cannot capture dense information contained in long-form responses well. In addition, we provide a detailed analysis of the reasons why automatic evaluation metrics fail when evaluating LFQA, offering valuable insights to advance LFQA evaluation systems.

Primary Area: datasets and benchmarks

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Submission Number: 4495