Toward Evaluation that Leads to Best Practices: Reconciling Dialog Evaluation in Research and Industry

Abstract

Dialog evaluation is approached in different ways by research and industry. While researchers have sought commensurable evaluation metrics that allow for comparison of disparate systems with varying tasks and domains, industry engineers have focused mostly on best practices and delivering a return-on-investment to customers. In this paper, we contend that the problem of finding commensurable metrics also applies to commercial evaluation, and critically survey four candidate metrics for commensurability. Finally, in light of the problems faced by the candidate metrics, we advocate a collaborative agenda for dialog evaluation based on using statistical meta-analysis for empirically establishing best practices from any evaluation metric.