BotEval: Facilitating Interactive Human Evaluation
This addresses the need for better evaluation methods in NLP for interactive tasks like negotiations and moderation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing annotation tools.
The authors tackled the problem of evaluating NLP models on interactive tasks by developing BotEval, an open-source toolkit that facilitates human-bot interactions, resulting in a customizable and user-friendly solution with built-in compatibility for crowdsourcing platforms.
Following the rapid progress in natural language processing (NLP) models, language models are applied to increasingly more complex interactive tasks such as negotiations and conversation moderations. Having human evaluators directly interact with these NLP models is essential for adequately evaluating the performance on such interactive tasks. We develop BotEval, an easily customizable, open-source, evaluation toolkit that focuses on enabling human-bot interactions as part of the evaluation process, as opposed to human evaluators making judgements for a static input. BotEval balances flexibility for customization and user-friendliness by providing templates for common use cases that span various degrees of complexity and built-in compatibility with popular crowdsourcing platforms. We showcase the numerous useful features of BotEval through a study that evaluates the performance of various chatbots on their effectiveness for conversational moderation and discuss how BotEval differs from other annotation tools.