Automatic Article Commenting: the Task and Dataset

Lianhui Qin, Lemao Liu, Wei Bi, Yan Wang, Xiaojiang Liu, Zhiting Hu, Hai Zhao, Shuming Shi

Comments of online articles provide extended views and improve user engagement. Automatically making comments thus become a valuable functionality for online forums, intelligent chatbots, etc. This paper proposes the new task of automatic article commenting, and introduces a large-scale Chinese dataset with millions of real comments and a human-annotated subset characterizing the comments' varying quality. Incorporating the human bias of comment quality, we further develop automatic metrics that generalize a broad set of popular reference-based metrics and exhibit greatly improved correlations with human evaluations.