Thresh: A Unified, Customizable and Deployable Platform for Fine-Grained Text Evaluation

TL;DR

Thresh is a versatile platform enabling customizable, unified, and deployable fine-grained text evaluation with easy configuration, community sharing, and support for multiple NLP tasks and deployment scales.

Contribution

It introduces Thresh, a flexible platform that simplifies building, deploying, and sharing fine-grained annotation tools for various NLP evaluation tasks.

Findings

Supports rapid setup with a single YAML file

Provides a community hub for sharing annotation frameworks

Offers multiple deployment options for different project scales

Abstract

Fine-grained, span-level human evaluation has emerged as a reliable and robust method for evaluating text generation tasks such as summarization, simplification, machine translation and news generation, and the derived annotations have been useful for training automatic metrics and improving language models. However, existing annotation tools implemented for these evaluation frameworks lack the adaptability to be extended to different domains or languages, or modify annotation settings according to user needs; and, the absence of a unified annotated data format inhibits the research in multi-task learning. In this paper, we introduce Thresh, a unified, customizable and deployable platform for fine-grained evaluation. With a single YAML configuration file, users can build and test an annotation interface for any framework within minutes -- all in one web browser window. To facilitate collaboration and sharing, Thresh provides a community hub that hosts a collection of fine-grained frameworks and corresponding annotations made and collected by the community, covering a wide range of NLP tasks. For deployment, Thresh offers multiple options for any scale of annotation projects from small manual inspections to large crowdsourcing ones. Additionally, we introduce a Python library to streamline the entire process from typology design and deployment to annotation processing. Thresh is publicly accessible at https://thresh.tools.