REFeREE: A REference-FREE Model-Based Metric for Text Simplification
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Abstract
Text simplification lacks a universal standard of quality, and annotated reference simplifications are scarce and costly. We propose to alleviate such limitations by introducing REFeREE, a reference-free model-based metric with a 3-stage curriculum. REFeREE leverages an arbitrarily scalable pretraining stage and can be applied to any quality standard as long as a small number of human annotations are available. Our experiments show that our metric outperforms existing reference-based metrics in predicting overall ratings and reaches competitive and consistent performance in predicting specific ratings while requiring no reference simplifications at inference time.