ModelRefs / BERTScore — AI Glossary

BERTScore — AI Glossary

A semantic similarity metric using contextual BERT embeddings to compare generated and reference texts beyond surface n-gram overlap.

Overview

BERTScore (Zhang et al. 2019) computes token-level cosine similarity between reference and candidate embeddings, taking maximum similarity for each reference token (recall) and candidate token (precision). Correlates better with human judgment than BLEU/ROUGE on summarization and translation. Computed using transformers library.

Reference details

Topicevaluation
Last reviewed2026-06-24

Primary source

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Frequently asked questions

What is BERTScore?

A semantic similarity metric using contextual BERT embeddings to compare generated and reference texts beyond surface n-gram overlap.

What concepts are related to BERTScore?

Closely related concepts include bleu, rouge, embedding model.