# Relevance in Dialogue: Is Less More? An Empirical Comparison of Existing Metrics, and a Novel Simple Metric

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.01823 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01823/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)
- [Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09977/) (2020)
- [USR: An Unsupervised and Reference Free Evaluation Metric for Dialog Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00456/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Evaluation of Interactive Dialog with DialoGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12719/) (2020)
- [Survey on Evaluation Methods for Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04071/) (2019)
- [Towards an Automatic Turing Test: Learning to Evaluate Dialogue Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07149/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Assessment of Dialog Evaluation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03706/) (2021)
- [RUBER: An Unsupervised Method for Automatic Evaluation of Open-Domain Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.03079/) (2017)
- [ACUTE-EVAL: Improved Dialogue Evaluation with Optimized Questions and Multi-turn Comparisons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03087/) (2019)
- [GRADE: Automatic Graph-Enhanced Coherence Metric for Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03994/) (2020)
- [DynaEval: Unifying Turn and Dialogue Level Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01112/) (2021)
- [Better Automatic Evaluation of Open-Domain Dialogue Systems with Contextualized Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10635/) (2019)
- [Deconstruct to Reconstruct a Configurable Evaluation Metric for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00483/) (2020)
- [Towards Unified Dialogue System Evaluation: A Comprehensive Analysis of Current Evaluation Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06110/) (2020)
- [Improving Neural Conversational Models with Entropy-Based Data Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05471/) (2019)
- [Automatic Evaluation and Moderation of Open-domain Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02110/) (2021)
- [Better Conversations by Modeling,Filtering,and Optimizing for Coherence and Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06873/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Evaluation of Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08198/) (2017)
- [An Argumentative Dialogue System for COVID-19 Vaccine Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12079/) (2021)
- [On the Use of Linguistic Features for the Evaluation of Generative Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06335/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we evaluate various existing dialogue relevance metrics, find strong dependency on the dataset, often with poor correlation with human scores of relevance, and propose modifications to reduce data requirements and domain sensitivity while improving correlation. Our proposed metric achieves state-of-the-art performance on the HUMOD dataset while reducing measured sensitivity to dataset by 37%-66%. We achieve this without fine-tuning a pretrained language model, and using only 3,750 unannotated human dialogues and a single negative example. Despite these limitations, we demonstrate competitive performance on four datasets from different domains. Our code, including our metric and experiments, is open sourced.