Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogues in Latent Space with Next Sentence Prediction and Mutual Information
Kun Zhao, Bohao Yang, Chenghua Lin, Wenge Rong, Aline Villavicencio, Xiaohui Cui
Abstract
The long-standing one-to-many issue of the open-domain dialogues poses significant challenges for automatic evaluation methods, i.e., there may be multiple suitable responses which differ in semantics for a given conversational context. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel learning-based automatic evaluation metric (CMN), which can robustly evaluate open-domain dialogues by augmenting Conditional Variational Autoencoders (CVAEs) with a Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) objective and employing Mutual Information (MI) to model the semantic similarity of text in the latent space. Experimental results on two open-domain dialogue datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with a wide range of baselines, especially in handling responses which are distant to the “golden” reference responses in semantics.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{zhao-etal-2023-evaluating,
title = "Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogues in Latent Space with Next Sentence Prediction and Mutual Information",
author = "Zhao, Kun and
Yang, Bohao and
Lin, Chenghua and
Rong, Wenge and
Villavicencio, Aline and
Cui, Xiaohui",
editor = "Rogers, Anna and
Boyd-Graber, Jordan and
Okazaki, Naoaki",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2023",
address = "Toronto, Canada",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.33/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.33",
pages = "562--574"
}