Towards an Automatic Turing Test: Learning to Evaluate Dialogue Responses

Ryan Lowe, Michael Noseworthy, Iulian Vlad Serban, Nicolas Angelard-Gontier, Yoshua Bengio, Joelle Pineau


Abstract
Automatically evaluating the quality of dialogue responses for unstructured domains is a challenging problem. Unfortunately, existing automatic evaluation metrics are biased and correlate very poorly with human judgements of response quality (Liu et al., 2016). Yet having an accurate automatic evaluation procedure is crucial for dialogue research, as it allows rapid prototyping and testing of new models with fewer expensive human evaluations. In response to this challenge, we formulate automatic dialogue evaluation as a learning problem. We present an evaluation model (ADEM)that learns to predict human-like scores to input responses, using a new dataset of human response scores. We show that the ADEM model’s predictions correlate significantly, and at a level much higher than word-overlap metrics such as BLEU, with human judgements at both the utterance and system-level. We also show that ADEM can generalize to evaluating dialogue mod-els unseen during training, an important step for automatic dialogue evaluation.
Anthology ID:
P17-1103
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1116–1126
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1103
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1103
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ryan Lowe, Michael Noseworthy, Iulian Vlad Serban, Nicolas Angelard-Gontier, Yoshua Bengio, and Joelle Pineau. 2017. Towards an Automatic Turing Test: Learning to Evaluate Dialogue Responses. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1116–1126, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards an Automatic Turing Test: Learning to Evaluate Dialogue Responses (Lowe et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1103.pdf
Note:
 P17-1103.Notes.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P17-1103.mp4
Code
 mike-n-7/ADEM