Sarah E. Finch

Sarah E. Finch, Ellie S. Paek, Jinho D. Choi

Developing high-performing dialogue systems benefits from the automatic identification of undesirable behaviors in system responses. However, detecting such behaviors remains challenging, as it draws on a breadth of general knowledge and understanding of conversational practices. Although recent research has focused on building specialized classifiers for detecting specific dialogue behaviors, the behavior coverage is still incomplete and there is a lack of testing on real-world human-bot interactions. This paper investigates the ability of a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM), ChatGPT-3.5, to perform dialogue behavior detection for nine categories in real human-bot dialogues. We aim to assess whether ChatGPT can match specialized models and approximate human performance, thereby reducing the cost of behavior detection tasks. Our findings reveal that neither specialized models nor ChatGPT have yet achieved satisfactory results for this task, falling short of human performance. Nevertheless, ChatGPT shows promising potential and often outperforms specialized detection models. We conclude with an in-depth examination of the prevalent shortcomings of ChatGPT, offering guidance for future research to enhance LLM capabilities.

Sarah E. Finch, James D. Finch, Jinho D. Choi

Despite tremendous advancements in dialogue systems, stable evaluation still requires human judgments producing notoriously high-variance metrics due to their inherent subjectivity. Moreover, methods and labels in dialogue evaluation are not fully standardized, especially for open-domain chats, with a lack of work to compare and assess the validity of those approaches. The use of inconsistent evaluation can misinform the performance of a dialogue system, which becomes a major hurdle to enhance it. Thus, a dimensional evaluation of chat-oriented open-domain dialogue systems that reliably measures several aspects of dialogue capabilities is desired. This paper presents a novel human evaluation method to estimate the rates of many dialogue system behaviors. Our method is used to evaluate four state-of-the-art open-domain dialogue systems and compared with existing approaches. The analysis demonstrates that our behavior method is more suitable than alternative Likert-style or comparative approaches for dimensional evaluation of these systems.

Sarah E. Finch, James D. Finch, Jinho D. Choi

Human evaluation has been widely accepted as the standard for evaluating chat-oriented dialogue systems. However, there is a significant variation in previous work regarding who gets recruited as evaluators. Evaluator groups such as domain experts, university students, and professional annotators have been used to assess and compare dialogue systems, although it is unclear to what extent the choice of an evaluator group can affect results. This paper analyzes the evaluator group impact on dialogue system evaluation by testing 4 state-of-the-art dialogue systems using 4 distinct evaluator groups. Our analysis reveals a robustness towards evaluator groups for Likert evaluations that is not seen for Pairwise, with only minor differences observed when changing evaluator groups. Furthermore, two notable limitations to this robustness are observed, which reveal discrepancies between evaluators with different levels of chatbot expertise and indicate that evaluator objectivity is beneficial for certain dialogue metrics.

Sarah E. Finch, Jinho D. Choi

Mastering commonsense understanding and reasoning is a pivotal skill essential for conducting engaging conversations. While there have been several attempts to create datasets that facilitate commonsense inferences in dialogue contexts, existing datasets tend to lack in-depth details, restate information already present in the conversation, and often fail to capture the multifaceted nature of commonsense reasoning. In response to these limitations, we compile a new synthetic dataset for commonsense reasoning in dialogue contexts using GPT, ConvoSense, that boasts greater contextual novelty, offers a higher volume of inferences per example, and substantially enriches the detail conveyed by the inferences. Our dataset contains over 500,000 inferences across 12,000 dialogues with 10 popular inference types, which empowers the training of generative commonsense models for dialogue that are superior in producing plausible inferences with high novelty when compared to models trained on the previous datasets. To the best of our knowledge, ConvoSense is the first of its kind to provide such a multitude of novel inferences at such a large scale.

Sarah E. Finch, Ellie S. Paek, Ikseon Choi et al.

As chatbots become integral to daily life, personalizing systems is key for fostering trust, engagement, and inclusivity. This study examines how linguistic similarity affects chatbot performance, focusing on integrating African American English (AAE) into virtual agents to better serve the African American community. We develop text-based and spoken chatbots using large language models and text-to-speech technology, then evaluate them with AAE speakers against standard English chatbots. Our results show that while text-based AAE chatbots often underperform, spoken chatbots benefit from an African American voice and AAE elements, improving performance and preference. These findings underscore the complexities of linguistic personalization and the dynamics between text and speech modalities, highlighting technological limitations that affect chatbots' AA speech generation and pointing to promising future research directions.

Sarah E. Finch, Jinho D. Choi

Open-domain dialogue systems need to grasp social commonsense to understand and respond effectively to human users. Commonsense-augmented dialogue models have been proposed that aim to infer commonsense knowledge from dialogue contexts in order to improve response quality. However, existing approaches to commonsense-augmented dialogue rely on implicit reasoning to integrate commonsense inferences during response generation. In this study, we explore the impact of explicit reasoning against implicit reasoning over commonsense for dialogue response generation. Our findings demonstrate that separating commonsense reasoning into explicit steps for generating, selecting, and integrating commonsense into responses leads to better dialogue interactions, improving naturalness, engagement, specificity, and overall quality. Subsequent analyses of these findings unveil insights into the effectiveness of various types of commonsense in generating responses and the particular response traits enhanced through explicit reasoning for commonsense integration. Our work advances research in open-domain dialogue by achieving a new state-of-the-art in commonsense-augmented response generation.

James D. Finch, Sarah E. Finch, Jinho D. Choi

Improving user experience of a dialogue system often requires intensive developer effort to read conversation logs, run statistical analyses, and intuit the relative importance of system shortcomings. This paper presents a novel approach to automated analysis of conversation logs that learns the relationship between user-system interactions and overall dialogue quality. Unlike prior work on utterance-level quality prediction, our approach learns the impact of each interaction from the overall user rating without utterance-level annotation, allowing resultant model conclusions to be derived on the basis of empirical evidence and at low cost. Our model identifies interactions that have a strong correlation with the overall dialogue quality in a chatbot setting. Experiments show that the automated analysis from our model agrees with expert judgments, making this work the first to show that such weakly-supervised learning of utterance-level quality prediction is highly achievable.

Sarah E. Finch, James D. Finch, Daniil Huryn et al.

We present a chatbot implementing a novel dialogue management approach based on logical inference. Instead of framing conversation a sequence of response generation tasks, we model conversation as a collaborative inference process in which speakers share information to synthesize new knowledge in real time. Our chatbot pipeline accomplishes this modelling in three broad stages. The first stage translates user utterances into a symbolic predicate representation. The second stage then uses this structured representation in conjunction with a larger knowledge base to synthesize new predicates using efficient graph matching. In the third and final stage, our bot selects a small subset of predicates and translates them into an English response. This approach lends itself to understanding latent semantics of user inputs, flexible initiative taking, and responses that are novel and coherent with the dialogue context.

Sarah E. Finch, James D. Finch, Ali Ahmadvand et al.

Inspired by studies on the overwhelming presence of experience-sharing in human-human conversations, Emora, the social chatbot developed by Emory University, aims to bring such experience-focused interaction to the current field of conversational AI. The traditional approach of information-sharing topic handlers is balanced with a focus on opinion-oriented exchanges that Emora delivers, and new conversational abilities are developed that support dialogues that consist of a collaborative understanding and learning process of the partner's life experiences. We present a curated dialogue system that leverages highly expressive natural language templates, powerful intent classification, and ontology resources to provide an engaging and interesting conversational experience to every user.

Sarah E. Finch, Jinho D. Choi

As conversational AI-based dialogue management has increasingly become a trending topic, the need for a standardized and reliable evaluation procedure grows even more pressing. The current state of affairs suggests various evaluation protocols to assess chat-oriented dialogue management systems, rendering it difficult to conduct fair comparative studies across different approaches and gain an insightful understanding of their values. To foster this research, a more robust evaluation protocol must be set in place. This paper presents a comprehensive synthesis of both automated and human evaluation methods on dialogue systems, identifying their shortcomings while accumulating evidence towards the most effective evaluation dimensions. A total of 20 papers from the last two years are surveyed to analyze three types of evaluation protocols: automated, static, and interactive. Finally, the evaluation dimensions used in these papers are compared against our expert evaluation on the system-user dialogue data collected from the Alexa Prize 2020.