Evaluation of text summarization approaches have been mostly based on metrics that measure similarities of system generated summaries with a set of human written gold-standard summaries. The most widely used metric in summarization evaluation has been the ROUGE family. ROUGE solely relies on lexical overlaps between the terms and phrases in the sentences; therefore, in cases of terminology variations and paraphrasing, ROUGE is not as effective. Scientific article summarization is one such case that is different from general domain summarization (e.g. newswire data). We provide an extensive analysis of ROUGE's effectiveness as an evaluation metric for scientific summarization; we show that, contrary to the common belief, ROUGE is not much reliable in evaluating scientific summaries. We furthermore show how different variants of ROUGE result in very different correlations with the manual Pyramid scores. Finally, we propose an alternative metric for summarization evaluation which is based on the content relevance between a system generated summary and the corresponding human written summaries. We call our metric SERA (Summarization Evaluation by Relevance Analysis). Unlike ROUGE, SERA consistently achieves high correlations with manual scores which shows its effectiveness in evaluation of scientific article summarization.
@cite_3 assesses the content quality of a candidate summary with respect to a set of human gold summaries based on their lexical overlaps. consists of several variants. Since its introduction, has been one of the most widely reported metrics in the summarization literature, and its high adoption has been due to its high correlation with human assessment scores in DUC datasets @cite_3 . However, later research has casted doubts about the accuracy of against manual evaluations. analyzed DUC 2005 to 2007 data and showed that while some systems achieve high scores with respect to human summaries, the linguistic and responsiveness scores of those systems do not correspond to the high scores.
@cite_3
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We present an approach for extractive single-document summarization. Our approach is based on a weighted graphical representation of documents obtained by topic modeling. We optimize importance, coherence and non-redundancy simultaneously using ILP. We compare ROUGE scores of our system with state-of-the-art results on scientific articles from PLOS Medicine and on DUC 2002 data. Human judges evaluate the coherence of summaries generated by our system in comparision to two baselines. Our approach obtains competitive performance. We present a fully automatic method for content selection evaluation in summarization that does not require the creation of human model summaries. Our work capitalizes on the assumption that the distribution of words in the input and an informative summary of that input should be similar to each other. Results on a large scale evaluation from the Text Analysis Conference show that input-summary comparisons are very effective for the evaluation of content selection. Our automatic methods rank participating systems similarly to manual model-based pyramid evaluation and to manual human judgments of responsiveness. The best feature, Jensen-Shannon divergence, leads to a correlation as high as 0.88 with manual pyramid and 0.73 with responsiveness evaluations. The summarization track at the Text Analysis Conference (TAC) is a direct continuation of the Document Understanding Conference (DUC) series of workshops, focused on providing common data and evaluation framework for research in automatic summarization. In the TAC 2008 summarization track, the main task was to produce two 100-word summaries from two related sets of 10 documents, where the second summary was an update summary. While all of the 71 submitted runs were automatically scored with the ROUGE and BE metrics, NIST assessors manually evaluated only 57 of the submitted runs for readability, content, and overall responsiveness. We provide an analysis of current evaluation methodologies applied to summarization metrics and identify the following areas of concern: (1) movement away from evaluation by correlation with human assessment; (2) omission of important components of human assessment from evaluations, in addition to large numbers of metric variants; (3) absence of methods of significance testing improvements over a baseline. We outline an evaluation methodology that overcomes all such challenges, providing the first method of significance testing suitable for evaluation of summarization metrics. Our evaluation reveals for the first time which metric variants significantly outperform others, optimal metric variants distinct from current recommended best variants, as well as machine translation metric BLEU to have performance on-par with ROUGE for the purpose of evaluation of summarization systems. We subsequently replicate a recent large-scale evaluation that relied on, what we now know to be, suboptimal ROUGE variants revealing distinct conclusions about the relative performance of state-of-the-art summarization systems.