2024/03/26 by Yichen Huang, Huang, Yichen, Ekaterina Kochmar +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Text Readability and Simplification
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2403.17640
openalex publication_date 2024/03/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.