Less is More for Long Document Summary Evaluation by LLMs

Yunshu Wu, Hayate Iso, Pouya Pezeshkpour, Nikita Bhutani, Estevam Hruschka

Main: Summarization Oral Paper

Session 8: Summarization (Oral)
Conference Room: Marie Louise 2
Conference Time: March 19, 16:00-17:30 (CET) (Europe/Malta)
TLDR:
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Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in summary evaluation tasks, yet they face challenges such as high computational costs and the \textit{Lost-in-the-Middle} problem where important information in the middle of long documents is often overlooked. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel approach, Extract-then-Evaluate, which involves extracting key sentences from a long source document and then evaluating the summary by prompting LLMs. The results reveal that the proposed method not only significantly reduces evaluation costs but also exhibits a higher correlation with human evaluations. Furthermore, we provide practical recommendations for optimal document length and sentence extraction methods, contributing to the development of cost-effective yet more accurate methods for LLM-based text generation evaluation.