In plain words: A new test collection of 20 language tasks with human ratings was used to check how well 11 AI models copy human judgments. Scores swung widely by task and judge expertise, so each use should be checked against humans first.
Abstract · LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks
There is an increasing trend towards evaluating NLP models with LLMs instead of human judgments, raising questions about the validity of these evaluations, as well as their reproducibility in the case of proprietary models. We provide JUDGE-BENCH, an extensible collection of 20 NLP datasets with human annotations covering a broad range of evaluated properties and types of data, and comprehensively evaluate 11 current LLMs, covering both open-weight and proprietary models, for their ability to replicate the annotations. Our evaluations show substantial variance across models and datasets. Models are reliable evaluators on some tasks, but overall display substantial variability depending on the property being evaluated, the expertise level of the human judges, and whether the language is human or model-generated. We conclude that LLMs should be carefully validated against human judgments before being used as evaluators.
Anna Bavaresco, Raffaella Bernardi, Leonardo Bertolazzi, Desmond Elliott, Raquel Fernández, Albert Gatt, Esam Ghaleb, Mario Giulianelli, Michael Hanna, Alexander Koller, André F. T. Martins, Philipp Mondorf, et al.
arXiv:2406.18403 · cs.CL · submitted Jun 26, 2024 · updated Jun 2, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to the main conference of ACL 2025