Title
On Evaluating and Comparing Conversational Agents.
Abstract
Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of non goal-oriented conversations, despite significant growth in research interest over recent years. To advance the state of the art in conversational AI, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a 2.5-million dollar university competition where sixteen selected university teams built conversational agents to deliver the best social conversational experience. Alexa Prize provided the academic community with the unique opportunity to perform research with a live system used by millions of users. The subjectivity associated with evaluating conversations is key element underlying the challenge of building non-goal oriented dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive evaluation strategy with multiple metrics designed to reduce subjectivity by selecting metrics which correlate well with human judgement. The proposed metrics provide granular analysis of the conversational agents, which is not captured in human ratings. We show that these metrics can be used as a reasonable proxy for human judgment. We provide a mechanism to unify the metrics for selecting the top performing agents, which has also been applied throughout the Alexa Prize competition. To our knowledge, to date it is the largest setting for evaluating agents with millions of conversations and hundreds of thousands of ratings from users. We believe that this work is a step towards an automatic evaluation process for conversational AIs.
Year
Venue
Field
2018
arXiv: Computation and Language
Proxy (climate),Data science,Evaluation strategy,Computer science,Subjectivity,Popularity,Judgement,Human judgment,Academic community,Liberian dollar
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1801.03625
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.45
11
13
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anu Venkatesh1153.16
Chandra Khatri2163.03
Ashwin Ram31087187.96
Fenfei Guo471.52
Raefer Gabriel5122.96
Ashish Nagar6120.93
Rohit Prasad760.96
Ming Cheng8153.37
Behnam Hedayatnia9122.28
Angeliki Metallinou1024516.39
Rahul Goel11102.58
Shaohua Yang12495.01
Anirudh Raju13143.05