Don’t Forget Your ABC’s: Evaluating the State-of-the-Art in Chat-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Sarah E. Finch, James D. Finch, Jinho D. Choi


Abstract
Despite tremendous advancements in dialogue systems, stable evaluation still requires human judgments producing notoriously high-variance metrics due to their inherent subjectivity. Moreover, methods and labels in dialogue evaluation are not fully standardized, especially for open-domain chats, with a lack of work to compare and assess the validity of those approaches. The use of inconsistent evaluation can misinform the performance of a dialogue system, which becomes a major hurdle to enhance it. Thus, a dimensional evaluation of chat-oriented open-domain dialogue systems that reliably measures several aspects of dialogue capabilities is desired. This paper presents a novel human evaluation method to estimate the rates of many{pasted macro ‘LN’} dialogue system behaviors. Our method is used to evaluate four state-of-the-art open-domain dialogue systems and compared with existing approaches. The analysis demonstrates that our behavior method is more suitable than alternative Likert-style or comparative approaches for dimensional evaluation of these systems.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.839
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15044–15071
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.839
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.839
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sarah E. Finch, James D. Finch, and Jinho D. Choi. 2023. Don’t Forget Your ABC’s: Evaluating the State-of-the-Art in Chat-Oriented Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15044–15071, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Don’t Forget Your ABC’s: Evaluating the State-of-the-Art in Chat-Oriented Dialogue Systems (Finch et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2023.acl-long.839.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2023.acl-long.839.mp4