VizSeq: A Visual Analysis Toolkit for Text Generation Tasks

Abstract

Automatic evaluation of text generation tasks (e.g. machine translation, text summarization, image captioning and video description) usually relies heavily on task-specific metrics, such as BLEU (Papineni et al., 2002) and ROUGE (Lin, 2004). They, however, are abstract numbers and are not perfectly aligned with human assessment. This suggests inspecting detailed examples as a complement to identify system error patterns. In this paper, we present VizSeq, a visual analysis toolkit for instance-level and corpus-level system evaluation on a wide variety of text generation tasks. It supports multimodal sources and multiple text references, providing visualization in Jupyter notebook or a web app interface. It can be used locally or deployed onto public servers for centralized data hosting and benchmarking. It covers most common n-gram based metrics accelerated with multiprocessing, and also provides latest embedding-based metrics such as BERTScore (Zhang et al., 2019).