Simone Caldarella


2022

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Evaluation of Response Generation Models: Shouldn’t It Be Shareable and Replicable?
Seyed Mahed Mousavi | Gabriel Roccabruna | Michela Lorandi | Simone Caldarella | Giuseppe Riccardi
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)

Human Evaluation (HE) of automatically generated responses is necessary for the advancement of human-machine dialogue research. Current automatic evaluation measures are poor surrogates, at best. There are no agreed-upon HE protocols and it is difficult to develop them. As a result, researchers either perform non-replicable, non-transparent and inconsistent procedures or, worse, limit themselves to automated metrics. We propose to standardize the human evaluation of response generation models by publicly sharing a detailed protocol. The proposal includes the task design, annotators recruitment, task execution, and annotation reporting. Such protocol and process can be used as-is, as-a-whole, in-part, or modified and extended by the research community. We validate the protocol by evaluating two conversationally fine-tuned state-of-the-art models (GPT-2 and T5) for the complex task of personalized response generation. We invite the community to use this protocol - or its future community amended versions - as a transparent, replicable, and comparable approach to HE of generated responses.