Comparing Automatic Evaluation Measures for Image Description

Desmond Elliott, Frank Keller

    59 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Image description is a new natural language generation task, where the aim is to generate a human-like description of an image. The evaluation of computer-generated text is a notoriously difficult problem, however, the quality of image descriptions has typically been measured using unigram BLEU and human judgements. The focus of this paper is to determine the correlation of automatic measures with human judgements for this task. We estimate the correlation of unigram and Smoothed BLEU, TER, ROUGE-SU4, and Meteor against human judgements on two data sets. The main finding is that unigram BLEU has a weak correlation, and Meteor has the strongest correlation with human judgements.

    Original languageUndefined/Unknown
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
    Number of pages6
    Publication date2014
    Pages452-457
    Publication statusPublished - 2014

    Cite this