Computer Science Colloquium, 2008-2009

Ron Artstein
Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California
Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Semi-Formal Evaluation of Conversational Characters


Abstract:

Conversational dialogue systems cannot be evaluated in a fully formal manner, because dialogue is heavily dependent on context, and current dialogue theory is not precise enough to specify a target output ahead of time. Instead, we evaluate dialogue systems in a semi-formal manner, using human judges to rate the coherence of a conversational character's responses and correlating these judgments with measures extracted from within the system. We present a series of three evaluations of a single conversational character over the course of a year, demonstrating how this kind of evaluation helps bring about an improvement in overall dialogue coherence.



Martin Charles Golumbic