Code summarization facilitates program comprehension and software maintenance by converting code snippets into natural-language descriptions. Over the years, numerous methods have been developed for this task, but a key challenge remains: effectively evaluating the quality of generated summaries. While human evaluation is effective for assessing code summary quality, it is labor-intensive and difficult to scale. Commonly used automatic metrics, such as BLEU, ROUGE-L, METEOR, and BERTScore, often fail to align closely with human judgments. In this paper, we explore the potential ofLarge Language Models (LLMs)for evaluating code summarization. We propose CODERPE (Role-Player for Code Summarization Evaluation), a novel method that leverages role-player prompting to assess the quality of generated summaries. Specifically, we prompt LLM-based evaluators to take on diverse roles, such as code reviewer, code author, code editor, and system analyst. Each role evaluates the quality of code summaries across key dimensions, including coherence, consistency, fluency, and relevance. We further explore the robustness of LLMs as evaluators by employing various prompting strategies, including chain-of-thought reasoning, incontext learning, and tailored rating form designs. The results demonstrate that LLMs serve as effective evaluators for code summarization. Notably, our LLM-based evaluator, CODERPE , achieves an 80.18% Spearman correlation with human evaluations, outperforming the existing BERTScore metric by 10.39%.

Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Peng Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Ranran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Sanjay Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Wenpeng Yin. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

Wenting Zhao, Ye Liu, Yao Wan, Yibo Wang, Qingyang Wu, Zhongfen Deng, Jiangshu Du, Shuaiqi Liu, Yunlong Xu, Philip Yu. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Abstractive summarization aims to generate a concise summary covering the input document's salient information. Within a report document, the salient information can be scattered in the textual and non-textual content. However, existing document summarization datasets and methods usually focus on the text and filter out the non-textual content. Missing tabular data can limit produced summaries' informativeness, especially when summaries require covering quantitative descriptions of critical metrics in tables. Existing datasets and methods cannot meet the requirements of summarizing long text and dozens of tables in each report document. To deal with the scarcity of available datasets, we propose FINDSum, the first large-scale dataset for long text and multi-table summarization. Built on 21,125 annual reports from 3,794 companies, FINDSum has two subsets for summarizing each company's results of operations and liquidity. Besides, we present four types of summarization methods to jointly consider text and table content when summarizing reports. Additionally, we propose a set of evaluation metrics to assess the usage of numerical information in produced summaries. Our summarization methods significantly outperform advanced baselines, which verifies the necessity of incorporating textual and tabular data when summarizing report documents. We also conduct extensive comparative experiments to identify vital model components and configurations that can improve summarization results.

Product attribute value extraction is an important task in e-Commerce which can help several downstream applications such as product search and recommendation. Most previous models handle this task using sequence labeling or question answering method which rely on the sequential position information of values in the product text and are vulnerable to data discrepancy between training and testing. This limits their generalization ability to real-world scenario in which each product can have multiple descriptions across various shopping platforms with different composition of text and style. They also have limited zero-shot ability to new values. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning model with value generation/classification and attribute prediction called JPAVE to predict values without the necessity of position information of values in the text. Furthermore, the copy mechanism in value generator and the value attention module in value classifier help our model address the data discrepancy issue by only focusing on the relevant part of input text and ignoring other information which causes the discrepancy issue such as sentence structure in the text. Besides, two variants of our model are designed for open-world and closed-world scenarios. In addition, copy mechanism introduced in the first variant based on value generation can improve its zero-shot ability for identifying unseen values. Experimental results on a public dataset demonstrate the superiority of our model compared with strong baselines and its generalization ability of predicting new values.

Aspect-based meeting transcript summarization aims to produce multiple summaries, each focusing on one aspect of content in a meeting transcript. It is challenging as sentences related to different aspects can mingle together, and those relevant to a specific aspect can be scattered throughout the long transcript of a meeting. The traditional summarization methods produce one summary mixing information of all aspects, which cannot deal with the above challenges of aspect-based meeting transcript summarization. In this paper, we propose a two-stage method for aspect-based meeting transcript summarization. To select the input content related to specific aspects, we train a sentence classifier on a dataset constructed from the AMI corpus with pseudo-labeling. Then we merge the sentences selected for a specific aspect as the input for the summarizer to produce the aspect-based summary. Experimental results on the AMI corpus outperform many strong baselines, which verifies the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Position bias, the phenomenon whereby users tend to focus on higher-ranked items of the search result list regardless of the actual relevance to queries, is prevailing in many ranking systems. Position bias in training data biases the ranking model, leading to increasingly unfair item rankings, click-through-rate (CTR), and conversion rate (CVR) predictions. To jointly mitigate position bias in both item CTR and CVR prediction, we propose two position-bias-free CTR and CVR prediction models: Position-Aware Click-Conversion (PACC) and PACC via Position Embedding (PACC-PE). PACC is built upon probability decomposition and models position information as a probability. PACC-PE utilizes neural networks to model product-specific position information as embedding. Experiments on the E-commerce sponsored product search dataset show that our proposed models have better ranking effectiveness and can greatly alleviate position bias in both CTR and CVR prediction.

The non-autoregressive models have boosted the efficiency of neural machine translation through parallelized decoding at the cost of effectiveness, when comparing with the autoregressive counterparts.In this paper, we claim that the syntactic and semantic structures among natural language are critical for non-autoregressive machine translation and can further improve the performance.However, these structures are rarely considered in existing non-autoregressive models.Inspired by this intuition, we propose to incorporate the explicit syntactic and semantic structures of languages into a non-autoregressive Transformer, for the task of neural machine translation.Moreover, we also consider the intermediate latent alignment within target sentences to better learn the long-term token dependencies.Experimental results on two real-world datasets (i.e., WMT14 En-De and WMT16 En-Ro) show that our model achieves a significantly faster speed, as well as keeps the translation quality when compared with several stateof-the-art non-autoregressive models.

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC), which requires a machine to answer questions given the relevant documents, is an important way to test machines' ability to understand human language.Multiple-choice MRC is one of the most studied tasks in MRC due to the convenience of evaluation and the flexibility of answer format.Post-hoc interpretation aims to explain a trained model and reveal how the model arrives at the prediction.One of the most important interpretation forms is to attribute model decisions to input features.Based on post-hoc interpretation methods, we assess attributions of paragraphs in multiplechoice MRC and improve the model by punishing the illogical attributions.Our method can improve model performance without any external information and model structure change.Furthermore, we also analyze how and why such a self-training method works.