Mirella Lapata. 2006. Automatic Evaluation of Information Ordering: Kendall's Tau. In Computational Linguistics, 3:4, 471-484.

This paper considers the automatic evaluation of information ordering, a task underlying many text-based applications such as concept generation and multidocument summarization. We propose an evaluation method based on Kendall's τ, a metric of rank correlation. The method is inexpensive, robust, and representation-independent. We show that Kendall's τ correlates reliably with human ratings and reading times.

@Article{Lapata:06,
  author = 	 {Mirella Lapata},
  title = 	 {Automatic Evaluation of Information Ordering},
  journal = 	 {Computational Linguistics},
  year = 	 2006, 
  volume =       32,
  number =       {4},
  pages =        {471--484}
}