The automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogues remains a largely unsolved challenge. Despite the abundance of work done in the field, human judges have to evaluate dialogues’ quality. As a consequence, performing such evaluations at scale is usually expensive. This work investigates using a deep-learning model trained on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark to serve as a quality indication of open-domain dialogues. The aim is to use the various GLUE tasks as different perspectives on judging the quality of conversation, thus reducing the need for additional training data or responses that serve as quality references. Due to this nature, the method can infer various quality metrics and can derive a component-based overall score. We achieve statistically significant correlation coefficients of up to 0.7.

Dialogue systems for interaction with humans have been enjoying increased popularity in the research and industry fields. To this day, the best way to estimate their success is through means of human evaluation and not automated approaches, despite the abundance of work done in the field. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of perceiving dialogue evaluation as an anomaly detection task. The paper looks into four dialogue modeling approaches and how their objective functions correlate with human annotation scores. A high-level perspective exhibits negative results. However, a more in-depth look shows some potential for using anomaly detection for evaluating dialogues.

Computer-based systems for communication with humans are a cornerstone of AI research since the 1950s. So far, the most effective way to assess the quality of the dialogues produced by these systems is to use resource-intensive manual labor instead of automated means. In this work, we investigate whether language models (LM) based on transformer neural networks can indicate the quality of a conversation. In a general sense, language models are methods that learn to predict one or more words based on an already given context. Due to their unsupervised nature, they are candidates for efficient, automatic indication of dialogue quality. We demonstrate that human evaluators have a positive correlation between the output of the language models and scores. We also provide some insights into their behavior and inner-working in a conversational context.