A Review of Evaluation Techniques for Social Dialogue Systems

In contrast with goal-oriented dialogue, social dialogue has no clear measure of task success. Consequently, evaluation of these systems is notoriously hard. In this paper, we review current evaluation methods, focusing on automatic metrics. We conclude that turn-based metrics often ignore the context and do not account for the fact that several replies are valid, while end-of-dialogue rewards are mainly hand-crafted. Both lack grounding in human perceptions.