An In-depth Evaluation of Large Language Models in Sentence Simplification with Error-based Human Assessment

TL;DR

This paper evaluates large language models' sentence simplification abilities using an error-based human assessment framework, revealing their strengths, limitations, and the inadequacy of current automatic metrics for high-quality simplifications.

Contribution

It introduces an error-based human annotation framework for more reliable evaluation of LLMs in sentence simplification, addressing limitations of existing methods.

Findings

LLMs generate fewer errors than previous models.

GPT-4 and Qwen2.5-72B struggle with lexical paraphrasing.

Automatic metrics lack sensitivity for high-quality LLM outputs.

Abstract

Recent studies have used both automatic metrics and human evaluations to assess the simplification abilities of LLMs. However, the suitability of existing evaluation methodologies for LLMs remains in question. First, the suitability of current automatic metrics on LLMs' simplification evaluation is still uncertain. Second, current human evaluation approaches in sentence simplification often fall into two extremes: they are either too superficial, failing to offer a clear understanding of the models' performance, or overly detailed, making the annotation process complex and prone to inconsistency, which in turn affects the evaluation's reliability. To address these problems, this study provides in-depth insights into LLMs' performance while ensuring the reliability of the evaluation. We design an error-based human annotation framework to assess the LLMs' simplification capabilities. We select both closed-source and open-source LLMs, including GPT-4, Qwen2.5-72B, and Llama-3.2-3B. We believe that these models offer a representative selection across large, medium, and small sizes of LLMs. Results show that LLMs generally generate fewer erroneous simplification outputs compared to the previous state-of-the-art. However, LLMs have their limitations, as seen in GPT-4's and Qwen2.5-72B's struggle with lexical paraphrasing. Furthermore, we conduct meta-evaluations on widely used automatic metrics using our human annotations. We find that these metrics lack sufficient sensitivity to assess the overall high-quality simplifications, particularly those generated by high-performance LLMs.