Evaluating Coherence in Dialogue Systems using Entailment

Nouha Dziri, Ehsan Kamalloo, Kory Mathewson, Osmar Zaiane


Abstract
Evaluating open-domain dialogue systems is difficult due to the diversity of possible correct answers. Automatic metrics such as BLEU correlate weakly with human annotations, resulting in a significant bias across different models and datasets. Some researchers resort to human judgment experimentation for assessing response quality, which is expensive, time consuming, and not scalable. Moreover, judges tend to evaluate a small number of dialogues, meaning that minor differences in evaluation configuration may lead to dissimilar results. In this paper, we present interpretable metrics for evaluating topic coherence by making use of distributed sentence representations. Furthermore, we introduce calculable approximations of human judgment based on conversational coherence by adopting state-of-the-art entailment techniques. Results show that our metrics can be used as a surrogate for human judgment, making it easy to evaluate dialogue systems on large-scale datasets and allowing an unbiased estimate for the quality of the responses.
Anthology ID:
N19-1381
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3806–3812
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1381
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1381
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nouha Dziri, Ehsan Kamalloo, Kory Mathewson, and Osmar Zaiane. 2019. Evaluating Coherence in Dialogue Systems using Entailment. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 3806–3812, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Coherence in Dialogue Systems using Entailment (Dziri et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1381.pdf
Code
 nouhadziri/DialogEntailment