PairEval: Open-domain Dialogue Evaluation with Pairwise Comparison
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Abstract (arXiv)
Building a reliable and automated evaluation metric is a necessary but challenging problem for open-domain dialogue systems. Recent studies proposed evaluation metrics that assess generated responses by considering their relevance to previous dialogue histories. Although effective, these metrics evaluate individual responses directly rather than considering their relative quality compared to other responses. To handle this, we propose PairEval, a novel dialogue evaluation metric for assessing responses by comparing their quality against responses in different conversations. PairEval is built on top of open-sourced and moderate-size language models, and we make them specialized in pairwise comparison between dialogue responses. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our metric exhibits a higher correlation with human judgments than baseline metrics. We also find that the proposed comparative metric is more robust in detecting common failures from open-domain dialogue systems, including repetition and speaker insensitivity.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 43 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2024.
Builds on
43 of 55 references.
References · 43
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31 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 3; 2025: 6; 2026: 2.
11 papers.
- 2024LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Taskscited by 236
- 2025Evaluating LLM-based Agents for Multi-Turn Conversations: A Surveycited by 56
- 2024Efficient LLM Comparative Assessment: a Product of Experts Framework for Pairwise Comparisonscited by 22
- 2025LCES: Zero-shot Automated Essay Scoring via Pairwise Comparisons Using Large Language Modelscited by 8
- 2026Who can we trust? LLM-as-a-jury for Comparative Assessmentcited by 7
- 2025Generalised Probabilistic Modelling and Improved Uncertainty Estimation in Comparative LLM-as-a-judgecited by 4
- 2025Exploring Persona Sentiment Sensitivity in Personalized Dialogue Generationcited by 3
- 2024Finetuning LLMs for Comparative Assessment Taskscited by 2
- 2025Evaluating LLM-Generated Versus Human-Authored Responses in Role-Play Dialoguescited by 1
- 2025LLM Optimization Unlocks Real-Time Pairwise Rerankingcited by 1
- 2026Can Small Language Models Handle Context-Summarized Multi-Turn Customer-Service QA? A Synthetic Data-Driven Comparative Evaluationcited by 0
- 2026Who can we trust? LLM-as-a-jury for Comparative Assessment18 Feb 2026
- 2026Can Small Language Models Handle Context-Summarized Multi-Turn Customer-Service QA? A Synthetic Data-Driven Comparative Evaluation31 Jan 2026
- 2025LLM Optimization Unlocks Real-Time Pairwise Reranking10 Nov 2025
- 2025Evaluating LLM-Generated Versus Human-Authored Responses in Role-Play Dialogues22 Sep 2025
- 2025Generalised Probabilistic Modelling and Improved Uncertainty Estimation in Comparative LLM-as-a-judge21 May 2025
- 2025LCES: Zero-shot Automated Essay Scoring via Pairwise Comparisons Using Large Language Models13 May 2025
- 2025Evaluating LLM-based Agents for Multi-Turn Conversations: A Survey28 Mar 2025
- 2025Exploring Persona Sentiment Sensitivity in Personalized Dialogue Generation17 Feb 2025
- 2024Finetuning LLMs for Comparative Assessment Tasks24 Sep 2024
- 2024LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks26 Jun 2024
- 2024Efficient LLM Comparative Assessment: a Product of Experts Framework for Pairwise Comparisons9 May 2024