AVA: an Automatic eValuation Approach to Question Answering Systems

Abstract: We introduce AVA, an automatic evaluation approach for Question Answering, which given a set of questions associated with Gold Standard answers, can estimate system Accuracy. AVA uses Transformer-based LLMs to encode question, answer, and reference text. This allows for effectively measuring the similarity between the reference and an automatic answer, biased towards the question semantics. To design, train and test AVA, we built multiple large training, development, and test sets on both public and industrial benchmarks. Our innovative solutions achieve up to 74.7% in F1 score in predicting human judgement for single answers. Additionally, AVA can be used to evaluate the overall system Accuracy with an RMSE, ranging from 0.02 to 0.09, depending on the availability of multiple references.