Does task decomposition improve automatic NLG evaluation?
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Does task decomposition improve automatic NLG evaluation?
Abstract:The LLM-as-a-judge (LLMaJ) framework has emerged as a promising solution for cheap, reproducible, reference-free Natural Language Generation (NLG) evaluation. Prior work seeks to improve LLMaJ by decomposing evaluation tasks into simpler sub-tasks. In this work, we systematically compare LLMaJ methods with and without decomposition on multiple NLG datasets. We find no evidence that LLMaJ with task decomposition leads to performance gains over a fair baseline that does not use decomposition. Instead, we find that previously reported performance gains in decomposition-based LLMaJ stem from using human labels as training data, and not task decomposition itself. Also, we find that, when human labels are available, LLMaJ without using task decomposition can perform comparably to human annotators.
| Comments: | Accepted to EMNLP 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.01139 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.01139v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.01139
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Submission history
From: Sebastian Steindl [view email][v1] Tue, 1 Sep 2026 12:15:53 UTC (2,055 KB)
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