ECoh: Turn-level Coherence Evaluation for Multilingual Dialogues

John Mendonca, Isabel Trancoso, Alon Lavie


Abstract
Despite being heralded as the new standard for dialogue evaluation, the closed-source nature of GPT-4 poses challenges for the community. Motivated by the need for lightweight, open source, and multilingual dialogue evaluators, this paper introduces GenResCoh (Generated Responses targeting Coherence). GenResCoh is a novel LLM generated dataset comprising over 130k negative and positive responses and accompanying explanations seeded from XDailyDialog and XPersona covering English, French, German, Italian, and Chinese. Leveraging GenResCoh, we propose ECoh (Evaluation of Coherence), a family of evaluators trained to assess response coherence across multiple languages. Experimental results demonstrate that ECoh achieves multilingual detection capabilities superior to the teacher model (GPT-3.5-Turbo) on GenResCoh, despite being based on a much smaller architecture. Furthermore, the explanations provided by ECoh closely align in terms of quality with those generated by the teacher model.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.44
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
516–532
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.44
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
John Mendonca, Isabel Trancoso, and Alon Lavie. 2024. ECoh: Turn-level Coherence Evaluation for Multilingual Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 516–532, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ECoh: Turn-level Coherence Evaluation for Multilingual Dialogues (Mendonca et al., SIGDIAL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.44.pdf