One key point is that they are using a metric called perplexity, "the uncertainty of predicting the next token."
From the post:
> Surprisingly, in our work, we discover that perplexity, an automatic metric that is readily available to any neural seq2seq model, exhibits a strong correlation with human evaluation, such as the SSA value. Perplexity measures the uncertainty of a language model. The lower the perplexity, the more confident the model is in generating the next token (character, subword, or word).