Papers › Towards an Automatic Turing Test: Learning to Evaluate Dialogue Responses

Towards an Automatic Turing Test: Learning to Evaluate Dialogue Responses

23 Aug 2017ACL 2017 7arXiv:1708.07149archive 2025-07-28

Ryan Lowe, Michael Noseworthy, Iulian V. Serban, Nicolas Angelard-Gontier, Yoshua Bengio, Joelle Pineau

Automatically evaluating the quality of dialogue responses for unstructured domains is a challenging problem. Unfortunately, existing automatic evaluation metrics are biased and correlate very poorly with human judgements of response quality. Yet having an accurate automatic evaluation procedure is crucial for dialogue research, as it allows rapid prototyping and testing of new models with fewer expensive human evaluations. In response to this challenge, we formulate automatic dialogue evaluation as a learning problem. We present an evaluation model (ADEM) that learns to predict human-like scores to input responses, using a new dataset of human response scores. We show that the ADEM model's predictions correlate significantly, and at a level much higher than word-overlap metrics such as BLEU, with human judgements at both the utterance and system-level. We also show that ADEM can generalize to evaluating dialogue models unseen during training, an important step for automatic dialogue evaluation.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

mike-n-7/ADEM officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Dialogue Evaluation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections