Automated metrics such as BLEU are widely used in the machine translation literature. They have also been used recently in the dialogue community for evaluating dialogue response generation. However, previous work in dialogue response generation has shown that these metrics do not correlate strongly with human judgment in the non task-oriented dialogue setting. Task-oriented dialogue responses are expressed on narrower domains and exhibit lower diversity. It is thus reasonable to think that these automated metrics would correlate well with human judgment in the task-oriented setting where the generation task consists of translating dialogue acts into a sentence. We conduct an empirical study to confirm whether this is the case. Our findings indicate that these automated metrics have stronger correlation with human judgments in the task-oriented setting compared to what has been observed in the non task-oriented setting. We also observe that these metrics correlate even better for datasets which provide multiple ground truth reference sentences. In addition, we show that some of the currently available corpora for task-oriented language generation can be solved with simple models and advocate for more challenging datasets.
Most of the work described so far has been done in the non task-oriented dialogue setting as there has been prior work indicating that automated metrics do not correlate well with humans in that setting. There has not yet been any empirical validation that these conclusions also apply to the task oriented setting. Research in the task oriented setting has mostly made use of automated metrics such as BLEU and human evaluation @cite_3 @cite_21 @cite_12 .
@cite_21 @cite_12 @cite_3
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Automated metrics such as BLEU are widely used in the machine translation literature. They have also been used recently in the dialogue community for evaluating dialogue response generation. However, previous work in dialogue response generation has shown that these metrics do not correlate strongly with human judgment in the non task-oriented dialogue setting. Task-oriented dialogue responses are expressed on narrower domains and exhibit lower diversity. It is thus reasonable to think that these automated metrics would correlate well with human judgment in the task-oriented setting where the generation task consists of translating dialogue acts into a sentence. We conduct an empirical study to confirm whether this is the case. Our findings indicate that these automated metrics have stronger correlation with human judgments in the task-oriented setting compared to what has been observed in the non task-oriented setting. We also observe that these metrics correlate even better for datasets which provide multiple ground truth reference sentences. In addition, we show that some of the currently available corpora for task-oriented language generation can be solved with simple models and advocate for more challenging datasets. We investigate evaluation metrics for dialogue response generation systems where supervised labels, such as task completion, are not available. Recent works in response generation have adopted metrics from machine translation to compare a model's generated response to a single target response. We show that these metrics correlate very weakly with human judgements in the non-technical Twitter domain, and not at all in the technical Ubuntu domain. We provide quantitative and qualitative results highlighting specific weaknesses in existing metrics, and provide recommendations for future development of better automatic evaluation metrics for dialogue systems. Abstract End-to-end dialog systems are gaining interest due to the recent advances of deep neural networks and the availability of large human–human dialog corpora. However, in spite of being of fundamental importance to systematically improve the performance of this kind of systems, automatic evaluation of the generated dialog utterances is still an unsolved problem. Indeed, most of the proposed objective metrics shown low correlation with human evaluations. In this paper, we evaluate a two-dimensional evaluation metric that is designed to operate at sentence level, which considers the syntactic and semantic information carried along the answers generated by an end-to-end dialog system with respect to a set of references. The proposed metric, when applied to outputs generated by the systems participating in track 2 of the DSTC-6 challenge, shows a higher correlation with human evaluations (up to 12.8 relative improvement at the system level) than the best of the alternative state-of-the-art automatic metrics currently available. Neural task-oriented dialogue systems often struggle to smoothly interface with a knowledge base. In this work, we seek to address this problem by proposing a new neural dialogue agent that is able to effectively sustain grounded, multi-domain discourse through a novel key-value retrieval mechanism. The model is end-to-end differentiable and does not need to explicitly model dialogue state or belief trackers. We also release a new dataset of 3,031 dialogues that are grounded through underlying knowledge bases and span three distinct tasks in the in-car personal assistant space: calendar scheduling, weather information retrieval, and point-of-interest navigation. Our architecture is simultaneously trained on data from all domains and significantly outperforms a competitive rule-based system and other existing neural dialogue architectures on the provided domains according to both automatic and human evaluation metrics.