DialSim: A Dialogue Simulator for Evaluating Long-Term Multi-Party Dialogue Understanding of Conversational Agents

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced conversational agents, making them applicable to various fields (e.g., education, entertainment). Despite their progress, the evaluation of the agents often overlooks the complexities of real-world conversations, such as multi-party dialogues and extended contextual dependencies. To bridge this gap, we introduce DialSim, a dialogue simulation-based evaluation framework. In DialSim, an agent assumes the role of a character in a scripted conversation and is evaluated on their ability to answer spontaneous questions using only the dialogue history, while recognizing when they lack sufficient information. To support this framework, we introduce LongDialQA, a new QA dataset constructed from long-running TV shows, comprising over 1,300 dialogue sessions, each paired with more than 1,000 carefully curated questions, totaling over 352,000 tokens. To minimize reliance on prior knowledge, all character names are anonymized or swapped. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM-based conversational agents using DialSim reveals that even models with large context windows or RAG capabilities struggle to maintain accurate comprehension over long-term, multi-party interactions-underscoring the need for more realistic and challenging benchmarks in conversational AI.