Papers › Shades of BLEU, Flavours of Success: The Case of MultiWOZ

Shades of BLEU, Flavours of Success: The Case of MultiWOZ

10 Jun 2021ACL (GEM) 2021 8arXiv:2106.05555archive 2025-07-28

Tomáš Nekvinda, Ondřej Dušek

The MultiWOZ dataset (Budzianowski et al.,2018) is frequently used for benchmarking context-to-response abilities of task-oriented dialogue systems. In this work, we identify inconsistencies in data preprocessing and reporting of three corpus-based metrics used on this dataset, i.e., BLEU score and Inform & Success rates. We point out a few problems of the MultiWOZ benchmark such as unsatisfactory preprocessing, insufficient or under-specified evaluation metrics, or rigid database. We re-evaluate 7 end-to-end and 6 policy optimization models in as-fair-as-possible setups, and we show that their reported scores cannot be directly compared. To facilitate comparison of future systems, we release our stand-alone standardized evaluation scripts. We also give basic recommendations for corpus-based benchmarking in future works.

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BenchmarkingTask-Oriented Dialogue Systems

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