  Natural Language Generation (NLG) evaluation is a multifaceted task requiring
assessment of multiple desirable criteria, e.g., fluency, coherency, coverage,
relevance, adequacy, overall quality, etc. Across existing datasets for 6 NLG
tasks, we observe that the human evaluation scores on these multiple criteria
are often not correlated. For example, there is a very low correlation between
human scores on fluency and data coverage for the task of structured data to
text generation. This suggests that the current recipe of proposing new
automatic evaluation metrics for NLG by showing that they correlate well with
scores assigned by humans for a single criteria (overall quality) alone is
inadequate. Indeed, our extensive study involving 25 automatic evaluation
metrics across 6 different tasks and 18 different evaluation criteria shows
that there is no single metric which correlates well with human scores on all
desirable criteria, for most NLG tasks. Given this situation, we propose
CheckLists for better design and evaluation of automatic metrics. We design
templates which target a specific criteria (e.g., coverage) and perturb the
output such that the quality gets affected only along this specific criteria
(e.g., the coverage drops). We show that existing evaluation metrics are not
robust against even such simple perturbations and disagree with scores assigned
by humans to the perturbed output. The proposed templates thus allow for a
fine-grained assessment of automatic evaluation metrics exposing their
limitations and will facilitate better design, analysis and evaluation of such
metrics.

Computation and Language