arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

Does task decomposition improve automatic NLG evaluation?

Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.

Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2609.01139 (cs)
[Submitted on 1 Sep 2026]

Title:Does task decomposition improve automatic NLG evaluation?

View a PDF of the paper titled Does task decomposition improve automatic NLG evaluation?, by Sebastian Steindl and 3 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
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)

Submission history

From: Sebastian Steindl [view email]
[v1] Tue, 1 Sep 2026 12:15:53 UTC (2,055 KB)
Full-text links:

Access Paper:

Current browse context:

cs.CL
< prev   |   next >
Change to browse by:
cs

References & Citations

Loading...

BibTeX formatted citation

loading...
Data provided by:

Bookmark

BibSonomy Reddit
Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Discussion (0)

Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.

Sign in →

No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.

More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language