2018/10/14 by Elior Sulem, Omri Abend, Sulem, Elior +3 · 10 citations
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Text Readability and Simplification #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1810.05995
openalex publication_date 2018/10/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
BLEU is widely considered to be an informative metric for text-to-text generation, including Text Simplification (TS). TS includes both lexical and structural aspects. In this paper we show that BLEU is not suitable for the evaluation of sentence splitting, the major structural simplification operation. We manually compiled a sentence splitting gold standard corpus containing multiple structural paraphrases, and performed a correlation analysis with human judgments. We find low or no correlation between BLEU and the grammaticality and meaning preservation parameters where sentence splitting is involved. Moreover, BLEU often negatively correlates with simplicity, essentially penalizing simpler sentences.