SSEM — Standardized Scoring and Evaluation Metrics

Lightweight evaluation metrics for LLMs and AI agents. No platform. No API keys. Just scores.

SSEM provides 12 evaluation metrics covering text generation quality, factual consistency, hallucination detection, agentic AI evaluation, and safety — all with full scoring transparency and research citations.

Installation

# PyPI
pip install ssem

# uv
uv pip install ssem

# Latest from GitHub
pip install git+https://github.com/TechyNilesh/SSEM.git

Quick Start

from SSEM import SSEM

evaluator = SSEM()

# BERTScore — one line
result = evaluator.bertscore(
    ["The cat sat on the mat."],
    ["A cat was sitting on a mat."]
)
print(result.score)      # 0.87
print(result.explain())  # Full transparency report

Why SSEM?

SSEM	DeepEval / Ragas
12 metrics in one lightweight package	Bundled with platforms, tracing, dashboards
No LLM-as-judge required — embedding + NLI based	Often requires GPT-4 API calls ($$$)
Agentic metrics built-in — tool accuracy, reasoning chains	Focused on RAG, agents are afterthought
Every score is transparent — method, model, citations	Black-box scores
Runs offline on CPU — no API keys needed	Many require cloud API keys

Available Metrics

Text Generation Quality

Metric	Method	Score Range	Citation
semantic_similarity	Sentence embedding cosine/euclidean/pearson similarity	[-1, 1] or [0, 1]	Vadapalli et al. (2021)
bertscore	Token-level precision, recall, F1 via contextual embeddings	[0, 1]	Zhang et al. (2020)

Factual Consistency

Metric	Method	Score Range	Citation
faithfulness	Claim extraction + NLI/embedding entailment checking	[0, 1]	Kryscinski et al. (2020)
hallucination	Fraction of output claims NOT grounded in source	[0, 1]	Kryscinski et al. (2020); Manakul et al. (2023)
answer_relevancy	Question-answer embedding similarity	[0, 1]	Es et al. (2024)

Agentic AI Evaluation

Metric	Method	Score Range	Citation
reasoning_coherence	Sequential + goal-aligned step similarity, contradiction detection	[0, 1]	Xia et al. (2024)
tool_accuracy	Tool selection + parameter + ordering accuracy (LCS)	[0, 1]	Liu et al. (2023)
task_completion	Checklist or reference-based graded completion	[0, 1]	Liu et al. (2023)

Consistency & Safety

Metric	Method	Score Range	Citation
multi_turn_consistency	Cross-turn semantic consistency + contradiction detection	[0, 1]	Zheng et al. (2023)
selfcheck	Sampling consistency for hallucination detection	[0, 1]	Manakul et al. (2023)
toxicity	Classifier-based toxicity scoring	[0, 1]	Gehman et al. (2020)

Code Evaluation

Metric	Method	Score Range	Citation
code_correctness	Execution-based Pass@k with unbiased estimator	[0, 1]	Chen et al. (2021)

Scoring Transparency

Every SSEM metric returns a MetricResult — never a bare number. Each result includes:

result = evaluator.bertscore(outputs, references)

result.score           # 0.87 — the primary score
result.score_range     # (0.0, 1.0) — possible range
result.interpretation  # "Strong token-level overlap..."
result.method          # Step-by-step computation description
result.model_used      # "bert-base-multilingual-cased"
result.citations       # List of Citation objects
result.details         # Per-sample scores, intermediates
result.elapsed_sec     # Wall-clock time

# Full human-readable transparency report
print(result.explain())

Example output of result.explain():

Metric        : BERTScore
Score         : 0.8734
Score Range   : [0.0, 1.0]
Interpretation: Strong token-level overlap — output captures most reference content.
Model Used    : bert-base-multilingual-cased

How This Score Was Computed:
1. Encoded 1 sentence pairs into per-token contextual embeddings using 'bert-base-multilingual-cased'.
2. For each pair, built a cosine similarity matrix between output tokens and reference tokens.
3. Precision = mean of row-wise max similarities (each output token's best reference match).
4. Recall = mean of column-wise max similarities (each reference token's best output match).
5. F1 = harmonic mean of precision and recall.
6. Averaged across 1 pairs: P=0.8912, R=0.8561, F1=0.8734.

Research Citations:
  [1] Zhang, T., Kishore, V., Wu, F., Weinberger, K. Q., & Artzi, Y. (2020). BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT. ICLR 2020. https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09675

Usage Examples

Text Generation Evaluation

from SSEM import SSEM

evaluator = SSEM()

outputs = ["The cat sat on the mat.", "It was a sunny day."]
references = ["A cat was sitting on a mat.", "The weather was sunny."]

# Semantic similarity
result = evaluator.semantic_similarity(outputs, references)

# BERTScore (P/R/F1)
result = evaluator.bertscore(outputs, references)
print(result.details["precision"])  # 0.89
print(result.details["recall"])     # 0.85
print(result.details["f1"])         # 0.87

Faithfulness & Hallucination

output = "Paris is the capital of France. The Eiffel Tower is in London."
source = "Paris is the capital of France. The Eiffel Tower is located in Paris."

# Faithfulness — are claims grounded?
result = evaluator.faithfulness(output, source)
print(result.score)    # 0.5 — one of two claims is unfaithful
print(result.details)  # Per-claim breakdown with individual scores

# Hallucination — what fraction is fabricated?
result = evaluator.hallucination(output, source)
print(result.score)    # 0.5 — half the claims are hallucinated

Agentic AI Evaluation

# Reasoning chain coherence
result = evaluator.reasoning_coherence(
    reasoning_steps=[
        "First, I need to find the user's order history.",
        "Next, I'll filter orders from the last 30 days.",
        "Then, I'll calculate the total spending.",
        "Finally, I'll generate a summary report.",
    ],
    goal="Generate a spending report for the last month."
)
print(result.score)                       # 0.82
print(result.details["contradictions"])   # [] — no contradictions

# Tool call accuracy
result = evaluator.tool_accuracy(
    predicted_calls=[
        {"tool": "database_query", "params": {"table": "orders", "days": 30}},
        {"tool": "calculate_sum", "params": {"column": "amount"}},
    ],
    expected_calls=[
        {"tool": "database_query", "params": {"table": "orders", "days": 30}},
        {"tool": "calculate_sum", "params": {"column": "amount"}},
    ],
)
print(result.score)  # 1.0 — perfect tool usage

# Task completion (checklist mode)
result = evaluator.task_completion(
    agent_output="I queried the database and found 15 orders totaling $1,234.",
    expected_criteria=[
        "Query the order database",
        "Calculate total spending",
        "Report the number of orders",
    ],
)
print(result.score)  # 0.67 — 2 of 3 criteria met

Multi-Turn Consistency

result = evaluator.multi_turn_consistency(
    responses=[
        "I recommend Python for this project.",
        "Python has great ML libraries like scikit-learn.",
        "Actually, you should use Java instead.",  # contradiction!
    ]
)
print(result.score)                     # 0.61
print(result.details["contradictions"]) # Flags the Java contradiction

Code Correctness

result = evaluator.code_correctness(
    code_samples=[
        "def factorial(n):\n    if n <= 1: return 1\n    return n * factorial(n-1)",
        "def factorial(n):\n    return n * n",  # wrong
    ],
    test_code="assert factorial(5) == 120\nassert factorial(0) == 1",
    k_values=[1, 2],
)
print(result.details["pass_at_k"])  # {"pass@1": 0.5, "pass@2": 1.0}

Full Evaluation Report

report = evaluator.evaluate_all(
    output_sentences=["The cat sat on the mat."],
    reference_sentences=["A cat was sitting on a mat."],
    source_context="A cat was observed sitting on a mat in the room.",
    reasoning_steps=["Find the cat.", "Describe its position."],
)

print(report.summary())   # One-line-per-metric table
print(report.explain())   # Full transparency + bibliography
print(report.to_json())   # JSON export for pipelines

Research Citations

SSEM is grounded in peer-reviewed research. Every metric cites its origin:

Metric	Paper	Venue
BERTScore	Zhang et al. "BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT"	ICLR 2020
Semantic Similarity	Beken Fikri et al. "Semantic Similarity Based Evaluation for Abstractive News Summarization"	GEM @ ACL 2021
Faithfulness	Kryscinski et al. "Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization"	EMNLP 2020
SelfCheck	Manakul et al. "SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection"	EMNLP 2023
Answer Relevancy	Es et al. "RAGAS: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation"	EACL 2024
Reasoning Coherence	Xia, Li, Liu, Wu & Liu. "ReasonEval: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning Beyond Accuracy"	arXiv 2024
AgentBench	Liu et al. "AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents"	ICLR 2024
Pass@k	Chen et al. "Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code"	arXiv 2021
MT-Bench	Zheng et al. "Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena"	NeurIPS 2023
Toxicity	Gehman et al. "RealToxicityPrompts"	EMNLP 2020
LSI	Deerwester et al. "Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis"	JASIS 1990
NLI	Williams et al. "MultiNLI"	NAACL 2018

Access all citations programmatically:

evaluator.list_citations()  # Returns dict of all citations

Architecture

SSEM/
├── __init__.py        # Package exports
├── evaluator.py       # SSEM unified class — main entry point
├── core.py            # EmbeddingEngine, MetricResult, Citation, BaseMetric
├── semantic.py        # SemanticSimilarity, BERTScore
├── faithfulness.py    # Faithfulness, Hallucination
├── relevancy.py       # AnswerRelevancy
├── agentic.py         # ReasoningCoherence, ToolCallAccuracy, TaskCompletion
├── consistency.py     # MultiTurnConsistency, SelfCheckConsistency
├── safety.py          # Toxicity
├── code_eval.py       # CodeCorrectness (Pass@k)
├── report.py          # EvaluationReport
└── SSEM.py            # Legacy v1 (backward compatible)

Parameters

SSEM Constructor

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
model_name	str	"bert-base-multilingual-cased"	Any HuggingFace model
device	str	Auto-detected	"cpu", "cuda", or "mps"

Common Method Parameters

All methods accept the specific inputs for their metric and return a MetricResult.

See evaluator.list_metrics() for all available metrics.

Backward Compatibility

The original v1 API still works:

from SSEM import SemanticSimilarity

ssem = SemanticSimilarity(model_name='bert-base-multilingual-cased', metric='cosine')
score = ssem.evaluate(output_sentences, reference_sentences, level='sentence', output_format='mean')

Core Contributors

Nilesh Verma Website · GitHub

Citation

If you use SSEM in your research, please cite:

@misc{SSEM,
  author = {Nilesh Verma},
  title = {SSEM: Standardized Scoring and Evaluation Metrics},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/TechyNilesh/SSEM}}
}

License

SSEM is released under the MIT License.