@inproceedings{finch-choi-2020-towards,
    title = "Towards Unified Dialogue System Evaluation: A Comprehensive Analysis of Current Evaluation Protocols",
    author = "Finch, Sarah E.  and
      Choi, Jinho D.",
    editor = "Pietquin, Olivier  and
      Muresan, Smaranda  and
      Chen, Vivian  and
      Kennington, Casey  and
      Vandyke, David  and
      Dethlefs, Nina  and
      Inoue, Koji  and
      Ekstedt, Erik  and
      Ultes, Stefan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue",
    month = jul,
    year = "2020",
    address = "1st virtual meeting",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2020.sigdial-1.29/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.sigdial-1.29",
    pages = "236--245",
    abstract = "As conversational AI-based dialogue management has increasingly become a trending topic, the need for a standardized and reliable evaluation procedure grows even more pressing. The current state of affairs suggests various evaluation protocols to assess chat-oriented dialogue management systems, rendering it difficult to conduct fair comparative studies across different approaches and gain an insightful understanding of their values. To foster this research, a more robust evaluation protocol must be set in place. This paper presents a comprehensive synthesis of both automated and human evaluation methods on dialogue systems, identifying their shortcomings while accumulating evidence towards the most effective evaluation dimensions. A total of 20 papers from the last two years are surveyed to analyze three types of evaluation protocols: automated, static, and interactive. Finally, the evaluation dimensions used in these papers are compared against our expert evaluation on the system-user dialogue data collected from the Alexa Prize 2020."
}