QARLA: A Framework for the Evaluation of Text Summarization Systems

This paper presents a probabilistic framework, QARLA, for the evaluation of text summarisation systems. The input of the framework is a set of manual (reference) summaries, a set of baseline (automatic) summaries and a set of similarity metrics between summaries. It provides i) a measure to evaluate the quality of any set of similarity metrics, ii) a measure to evaluate the quality of a summary using an optimal set of similarity metrics, and iii) a measure to evaluate whether the set of baseline summaries is reliable or may produce biased results. Compared to previous approaches, our framework is able to combine different metrics and evaluate the quality of a set of metrics without any a-priori weighting of their relative importance. We provide quantitative evidence about the effectiveness of the approach to improve the automatic evaluation of text summarisation systems by combining several similarity metrics.