Soda-Eval: Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation in the age of LLMs

John Mendonça, Isabel Trancoso, Alon Lavie


Abstract
Although human evaluation remains the gold standard for open-domain dialogue evaluation, the growing popularity of automated evaluation using Large Language Models (LLMs) has also extended to dialogue. However, most frameworks leverage benchmarks that assess older chatbots on aspects such as fluency and relevance, which are not reflective of the challenges associated with contemporary models. In fact, a qualitative analysis on Soda. (Kim et al., 2023), a GPT-3.5 generated dialogue dataset, suggests that current chatbots may exhibit several recurring issues related to coherence and commonsense knowledge, but generally produce highly fluent and relevant responses.Noting the aforementioned limitations, this paper introduces Soda-Eval, an annotated dataset based on Soda that covers over 120K turn-level assessments across 10K dialogues, where the annotations were generated by GPT-4. Using Soda-Eval as a benchmark, we then study the performance of several open-access instruction-tuned LLMs, finding that dialogue evaluation remains challenging. Fine-tuning these models improves performance over few-shot inferences, both in terms of correlation and explanation.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.684
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11687–11708
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.findings-emnlp.684/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.684
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
John Mendonça, Isabel Trancoso, and Alon Lavie. 2024. Soda-Eval: Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation in the age of LLMs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 11687–11708, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Soda-Eval: Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation in the age of LLMs (Mendonça et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.findings-emnlp.684.pdf