Problem: Training function is imprecise (i.e. BLEU score)

  • Training is imperfect because current evaluation metrics (i.e. BLEU Score) measure neither conversation fluency nor task-completion.
    • Labels are often inadequate since there are often many valid methods of answering the same query, where the gold label serves as only one such method.
    • Training set is incomplete since you they cover only a subset of possible acceptable responses
    • LMs train the network to be grammatically coherent, but not necessarily relevant
  • Instead, a good method should be able to more closely mimic user satisfaction
    1. evaluate based on semantic similarity
    2. take context into account

What does it mean to have high user satisfaction?

  • Sentence-level fluency - sentence in isolation is valid and grammatically correct
  • Turn-level appropriateness - sentence is natural and makes sense given the user input
  • Dialogue-level fluency - sentence is strategically correct in getting the agent towards goal completion
  • Overall Variation - sufficient diversity in agent responses

How do we measure the satisfaction?

  • Ask the user for feedback after each dialogue –> Very inefficient/annoying
  • Hand-craft a “user satisfaction” estimator (e.g. success/length trade-off) –> We usually need to know the user goal to succeed
  • Train a “user satisfaction” estimator using user feedback –> We ask for user feedback only when we are uncertain about it

Quantitative Metrics

  • Perplexity
  • BLEU Score
  • METEOR
  • ROUGE
  • ADEM